Chapter 1: Why Scaling Innovation

The whole first chapter is free on my blog, but this post will summarize the chapter.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

The chapter starts by breaking down Innovation into three types (based on the McKinsey concept). Sustaining innovation is taken up by all product and platform teams and moves existing products forward in an incremental fashion. Emerging Innovation extends and rethinks existing products in new ways. Disruptive Innovation, the subject of this book, tackles the types of innovation that reinvent or extend your entire business.

Next, there’s an explanation of why Disruptive Innovation doesn’t work when embedded in existing core product and platform teams. That’s because Disruptive Innovation:

1. Grows too fast.

2. Requires additional resources.

3. Negatively affects core business metrics.

4. Is shuttered to move budgets around to core work.

When we established the Indeed Incubator, we overcame these challenges. The fundamental principles that made the Indeed Incubator teams successful were:

1. A dedicated team to explore ideas.

2. Executive sponsorship.

3. A cross-functionally aligned approach.

4. Minimal overhead, maximum speed.

5. Projects were dead unless proven otherwise.

Finally, the chapter ends with a sample project from ideation through completion. Going through multiple rounds of funding, pitches, scaling, and eventually exiting.

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Thanks for reading!