The New Rules of Innovation (goodbye beanbags, MVPs, pre-emptive ROI calculations and digital first ... hello to curiosity rewarded, Most Vital Experiments and autonomous venturing).

Typical "innovation" teams and labs were perfectly engineered to produce nothing but hype, slides and disappointment. This is what a real, modern, dangerous innovation team needs to look like.

Most of my career has been ‘innovation consulting’. Between around 2014 and 2020 … this was a very hot market, as every established organisation was setting up innovation teams, labs and churning our press releases featuring “innovation”, “digital”, “transformation”, “disruption” by the dozen.

Lots of activity happened in this time as nobody wanted to be Kodak or Blockbuster. But the biggest outcome from the period was the massive growth in platforms like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Meta, Google etc. supported by the big tech integration firms. It wasn’t really “innovation”, but a massive acceleration of digital systems that delivered volumes of data, dashboards and the perception of productivity.

Parallel to all this, we saw the rise of the likes of design thinking, human centred design and lean startup. All good, well intentioned things, that va…