Preface: Why This Book

I was inspired to write this book by a desire to help companies avoid missed opportunities. My goal is to help readers move more quickly and surely through the difficult territory of corporate innovation—one that requires navigating the world of pure innovation with the world of corporate norms, advantages, and constraints.

Innovation often languishes within established corporations because they are unable to manage the relationship between the new venture and the ongoing business. Ironically, the companies that squander innovative opportunities are often the same corporations searching for new avenues of growth because prospects in their core have stalled. In fact, history is replete with disruption of incumbent companies by innovations that the companies themselves had pioneered but could not get out of the labs; they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because organizational issues got in the way of innovation.

The Lean Startup is a set of practices that help to bring a concept from idea to validated business. It can help incumbents to respond more effectively to digital disruption, to create more innovative cultures, and to increase the speed and reliability of their innovation efforts. But Lean Startup methods require adaptation to be effective in the context of a large corporation. This book focuses on those adaptations and why they are necessary. It builds on my experience launching businesses at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and at Pitney Bowes Corporation and on the theories of some of the leading thinkers in innovation management.

I have learned from these thought leaders directly and indirectly, through studying their theories and trying to apply them, as individual practice and as a synthesized system. I started by reading their books and attempting to apply their findings in ongoing innovation projects. As Editor in Chief of Research-Technology Management, I also had the opportunity to interview them about their work. Those interviews were an opportunity to dig deeply into the practical challenges I confronted in applying their theories in the real world, and they pushed beyond the theory to the nitty-gritty issues that emerge in the messy work of corporate innovation. I can attest that the theories work in practice, but there is a substantial learning curve.

This book discusses both Lean Startup and a set of organizational practices that make it work in the corporate context. While the Lean Startup practices accelerate learning, the complementary practices help overcome organizational resistance. The additional practices—which are described in this book—help both to manage internal frictions and to enable an internal startup to leverage the assets of the core business.

The practices described in this book are “Yes … AND” practices: They complement the core principles of the Lean Startup itself. They have been tested—and have led to success—in real-world corporate settings. Although no two corporate cultures are exactly the same, many of the challenges are frighteningly common. These practices are a starting point for beginning the journey.