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Over the course of some four centuries, the telescope, in its various technological iterations, has transformed the way we see both the universe and ourselves. The transformation became most dramatic since 1990 when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and has since probed the very frontier of the universe, showing us reality as it existed some 13.82 billion years ago. This transformation has only multiplied as NASA launched its other “Great Observatories”—the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory in 1991, the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003.

Before these events, the most powerful perceptual and intellectual transformation wrought by the telescope came at the very beginning of its first years of use. In 1608, Galileo Galilei heard news of a Dutch spectacle-maker, Hans Lippershey, and the patent he filed for a device that could see beyond the sky. Within a day, Galileo got busy making his own version of this new, magical instrument. As with many inventions, the inventor and the innovator are not necessarily one and the same person. Lippershey deserves credit for inventing the telescope, but it was Galileo who made it an instrument of profound innovation.

Through this transformational lens—which in its first year allowed humankind to understand more of the universe than had been known over the preceding two thousand years—Galileo could see the mountains and craters of the moon and the daylit side of Venus. This revealed to him two earth-shaking facts. First, our universe was far bigger—and our place in it therefore far smaller—than previously understood. Second, those jagged mountains and pock-like craters were hardly evidence of the “perfect” and “eternal” work of a perfect and eternal God.

This convinced Galileo that the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had been correct some hundred years earlier, when he said the sun and not the earth was the center of what came to be called the solar system.

The shift to the view of the sun as the center of the solar system took many years and, as innovation so often does, questioned, eroded, and even destroyed old beliefs. Chipping away at cherished faiths requires fresh faith in the new belief. And there is often a price to pay. In 1633, many refused to believe they on earth were not the center of everything. They took steps to suppress the heretical idea that it was not the sun moving, but rather the earth itself. Galileo was summoned to the Inquisition and ultimately compelled to retract his Copernican view. In a formal allocution, he was forced to say aloud that, in God’s creation, the earth was stationary.

Aging and ill, Galileo did as he was told, denying that the earth orbited the sun. But legend has it that, after pronouncing the required allocution, he whispered more to himself than to those present, “E pur si muove”—“And yet it moves.”

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

—Thomas Edison

The Copernican Revolution, validated by Galileo’s “E pur si muove,” is a central example of what the controversial philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift” in his 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here he details the history and process of innovation, challenging conventional thinking about the progress of what he calls “normal science,” arguing that scientific progress is more episodic than accumulative, with breakthroughs occurring during periods of “revolutionary science.” Kuhn holds that, in revolutionary times, anomalies lead to new “paradigms,” which make it possible to ask new questions of old data, thereby superseding the mere “puzzle-solving” of earlier paradigms.

Each new paradigm changes the rules. The paradigm shift is therefore the product less of linear thinking than an exponential or revolutionary displacement in thinking. When he proved Copernicus correct, Galileo set into motion revolutionary thinking that transformed the prevailing Ptolemaic paradigm—the geocentric universe. Viewed in retrospect, we may conclude that Copernicus led to Galileo, who led to Kepler’s cosmology, and then ushered in Newtonian physics—progress begetting progress in serial fashion. Kuhn, however, argues that this linear interpretation is an ex post facto fiction. He sees this process of change as the product of revolutionary or breakthrough thinking. For purposes of analysis, he divides the process into phases:

• Phase 1 is the “pre-paradigm phase,” wherein no consensus exists on any particular theory.

• Phase 2 begins the operation of “normal science,” which puzzle-solves within the context of the dominant paradigm.

• Phase 3 witnesses the erosion of the dominant paradigm, which is shown to be increasingly unable to account for mounting anomalies. At this phase, the scientific community enters a crisis period.

• Phase 4 is the paradigm shift. In this period of scientific revolution, underlying assumptions are re-examined, and the new paradigm or way of thinking takes hold.

• Phase 5 is the “post-revolution” period, during which scientists return to normal science and solve puzzles within this new and now-dominant paradigm.

Fifty-six years after its publication, Kuhn’s groundbreaking framework continues to prove durable. It applies to today’s struggle over innovation. In some ways, the way we now think about innovation is entering Kuhn’s Phase 3. That is, we are unable to account for mounting anomalies, which makes us feel we are entering a crisis period that demands a new approach, a new paradigm.

As Kuhn envisioned the process in the 1960s, true paradigm shifts are rare events. They may not even occur at the modest rate of one per century. This leaves you and your business plenty of room for puzzle-solving, incremental progress, and the accumulation of innovation that may someday reach the critical mass for a new, fresh Kuhnian paradigm shift. Kuhn further argues that the dominant paradigm so controls the agenda of thinking that it is sometimes impossible to break away from it, to “think different,” to even imagine that it is the earth that revolves around the sun. In other words, the incumbent status quo is easy, addictive, and comfortable.

In this, Kuhn echoes our approach to driving change leadership and innovation. First, if we are to innovate in our businesses, we must not restrict ourselves to approaches to innovation that are ruled by the status quo. Second, we must look for constant, though linear, progress rather than waiting for that lightning strike of revolutionary progress—which may not come for another hundred years. Third, innovation today requires “chunking”—breaking into manageable, doable steps that allow us to keep driving innovation ahead rather than waiting for revolution to happen. If we can keep moving along a linear pathway of progress, we can create value at regular intervals and enjoy incremental success.

Assuming we are in Phase 3, experiencing the erosion of the dominant paradigm, we have no way of knowing how close we are to Phase 4, the paradigm shift. The digital transformation, in itself a paradigm shift, is driving the pace of change so rapidly and the scope of change so broadly that we may have good reason to believe that Kuhn’s 1960s-based estimate of the relative rarity of paradigm shifts—once a century—is no longer accurate. While it is important to keep innovating rather than passively awaiting the revolution, we need to recognize that linear thinking will not suffice amidst a paradigm shift. As you push ahead, be prepared to spring at a moment’s notice.

Linear Innovation:

First—Commit to a Way of Thinking

Scientists Heather Barry Kappes of New York University and Gabriele Oettingen of the University of Hamburg argue that we humans need both to imagine and fantasize about the big things we are going to do and about how we are going to do them. It is not enough to simply imagine a desired future state. We must also fantasize about the steps to get there. In fact, Kappes and Oettingen conclude that both imagining and fantasizing about these steps help muster the energy required to succeed.

Sometimes, our challenge is that we don’t believe we belong on a bigger stage or that we can innovate any kind of breakthrough, big or small. For example, Tina Seelig, a Stanford professor specializing in creativity and innovation, quotes studies indicating that “Up to 70 percent of people experience impostor syndrome at some time in their lives.” They believe the stage on which they stand is too big and that they have no business being on it. Behavioral expert Olivia Fox Cabane goes further: “In the impostor syndrome, people feel that they don’t really know what they’re doing, and it’s just a matter of time before they’re found out and exposed as a fraud.” She argues that this syndrome takes hold even at the highest levels of business and education, concluding: “I’ve heard that every time the incoming class of Stanford Business School is asked, ‘How many of you feel you are the one mistake the admissions committee made?’ two-thirds of the students immediately raise their hands.”

In business, the flipside of the impostor syndrome is an existentially total belief in yourself as a bold leader and successful innovator. Again, this is the role Chris Robinson played on the soap opera General Hospital and later in a Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup commercial pitch: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Actor Robinson was no doctor, but he believed, as any good actor must, that he was no impostor but a bona fide MD. Thomas Edison, the inventor who declared genius to be 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, even if he often publicly denied it almost certainly believed he did possess that critical 1 percent.

Belief in your existential legitimacy must be steadily fueled by your imagination, the lifeblood of innovation. Consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, before the Lincoln Memorial. King thoroughly imagined he had the legitimate right to dream that dream—and that was enough to persuade much of the world, opening a path to civil rights in the United States. Or think about Albert Einstein crediting his 1921 Nobel Prize and his development of the special theory of relativity to his own boyhood dreams about riding a light beam. He was confident that he had the right to dream such a thing—and he had the equation to prove it!

Or consider the iconic skier Jean-Claude Killy, who, in 1968, won all three Olympic alpine gold medals. He once told an interviewer about how, when he was recovering from a terrible downhill accident and was unable to ski, he continued to practice mentally. Was that a distant second best to being on the slopes? Common sense says yes. Yet Killy went from mental practice to delivering one of the best performances of his career.

Killy’s experience reminds me of Daley Thompson, who, like me, was a Decathlete. Unlike me, he won the Olympic Decathlon—twice. In 1984, he faced a high-drama athletic contest with his archrival, West Germany’s Juergen Hingsen, for the unofficial title of “world’s greatest athlete.” Each man had more than once traded world records, even if the UK’s Thompson had beaten Hingsen head-to-head on six consecutive occasions before entering the 1984 Olympics. When the competition for the gold, the 1984 Los Angeles Games, moved to the Decathlon’s seventh event, the discus, Thompson was keenly aware that this was his worst event and Hingsen’s best. Indeed, Thompson’s first two throws were well below even his normally weak measurement.

But on this day of all days, when it counted, Thompson drew on his imagination to visualize a winning throw. He imagined he had the right to be a great discus thrower, and he hurled the metal-and-wood plate to a personal best on his third and final throw, crushing the West German’s spirt and chance for gold.

“For that one moment,” Thompson explains, “I wasn’t interested in winning. Some people shy away from the high-pressure moments. It was what I had been looking for, a culmination of all I had trained for. Just to be faced with the situation in an Olympics—the feeling was incredible. And I’d faced it and overcome the thing I’m least competent in, the discus. I really hit the shit out of that discus.”

Jean-Claude Killy and Daley Thompson both practiced believing, visualizing each step toward success. When it counted most, their physical selves followed an internal belief and deep commitment they built from within. The truth is, it really does all begin with you. As a business leader, your own internal mindset and self-belief are your most powerful tools. Believing you are a bold and successful change leader and innovator is the first and fundamental step toward becoming…a bold and successful change leader and innovator.

Preparing internally to drive innovation breakthrough means taking yourself as seriously as you want others to take you. From working with top corporate CEOs and political leaders of many countries, I have discovered that each of them believes they are a top CEO or political leader. Their own affirmative self-image is a powerful driver, filter, and vision they aim at, move toward, and access. They take their leadership and their success earnestly, and this becomes a self-fulfilling element in leadership and success.

As business author and entrepreneur Tony Robbins reminds us, “Most people doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts.” Like the great and resilient athletes they were, Jean-Claude Killy and Daley Thompson used the power of visualization, the fuel of imagination, to give them the enduring self-confidence to face rejection after rejection. Innovators need thick skin to overcome the impostor syndrome by visualizing and believing in their own success. Knocked down, they see themselves getting up off the floor—and then they do just that.

Consider, for example, the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally securing funding for their innovations:

• Skype 40

• Cisco 76

• Pandora 300

• Google 350

Or consider the 302 rejections Roy Disney received from the banks he approached to fund his “new” amusement park, Disneyland. Or the Social Security check sixty-five-year-old Colonel Sanders cashed, which led him to pledge prophetically to himself: “I’m going to build something new with my life, I’m going to create something called ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken.’ ”

Research shows that successful innovators deeply believe three things:

• First, innovation is there—it exists or will exist.

• Second, innovation must and will be found.

• Third, innovation will be worth it once it is found.

Invariably, all three of these core beliefs are a part of innovation success—an inner belief that innovation can happen, will happen, and will be worth the journey. In fact, this inner belief—and the leader’s ability to cascade and leverage it within the organization—has never been more important in creating and sustaining a culture of innovation and a successful business. Put another way, the ability to leverage belief is the minimal requirement to advancing leadership, company, and product breakthroughs and doing what it takes to grow a business: increasing the number of customers, the average transaction value, and the frequency of repurchase. It is essential to what pioneering marketer Sergio Zyman described as the job of marketing and innovation: “Sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently.”

Leveraging belief strips away the impostor syndrome and commits to an insurgent way of thinking about playing offense and driving innovation forward. Or else. At key times, this means channeling the do-or-die analogy constructed by Napoleon Hill in his 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich. Hill applied the lessons of Conquistador Hernán Cortés. Back in 1519, as he landed on the shores of Mexico’s Yucatan, he knew the odds were against him. He had to convince his crew of 600 sailors and soldiers that he truly believed and that they must as well. So, he scuttled his ships. With no means of turning back, there was no choice but to believe in victory. As Hill puts it:

A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield.… Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!” They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.

Linear Innovation:

Second—Think Innovation Not Invention

Sergio Zyman constructed a wonderfully fresh approach to innovation in his 2004 book, Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing. Too often, Zyman argues, the conventional quest for innovation amounts to a search for a shiny new object. Or, as Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, puts it on the inside cover of Zyman’s book: “Management thinkers, business writers, and global executives have too long been infatuated with the Next Big Thing. But the next thing is not always big and the big thing is not always next.”

Extending Zyman and Moore’s argument into today’s business environment, we see that many companies habitually close their eyes and reflexively swing for the fences. They try to invent their way out of the ballpark with the Next Big Thing. In 2004, Zyman and Moore argued that such thinking is a mistake. Today, I argue it is more of a mistake than ever.

Instead of blindly swinging to invent the Next Big Thing, business leaders do better to focus on disrupting, renovating, and innovating their thinking, destination, battlefield map, attitudinal segmentation, brand positioning, customer experience, core strategy, and executional campaign. They are better off innovating rather than trying to invent their way to success.

As Kuhn might put it: Focus on “normal science,” step-by-step progress, and “puzzle-solving,” rather than “revolutionary science” and history’s oh-so-rare paradigm shifts. Instead of inventing the Next Big Thing, focus on innovating every single day.

This is what America’s most iconic “inventor,” Thomas Edison, did. His ethos of innovation—in contrast to invention—underpins our argument. Take the light bulb. The most prolific inventor of our age, Edison set out, he said, to “subdivide light.” In this quest, he was fueled by the deep-seated belief that he could really do this. But it did not take genius. Edison replaced genius—inventing something from nothing—with analogy, innovating something by spring-boarding off something else. He worked step-by-step to create the incandescent electric light. He played the part of extraordinary innovator, repeatedly. He was not sure he was an inventor, but he knew how to play the role of innovator—on demand. As we will see in the next chapter, he delivered a nearly endless series of innovations into the world. The process followed a set of doable steps. Some hit their mark, many others did not. No matter. He kept stepping, establishing with each step a vital connection between innovation and marketing.

Thomas Edison was very different from Albert Einstein, one of history’s most revolutionary thinkers. Where Edison enlarged existing paradigms, innovating upon whatever came to hand, Einstein challenged paradigms—as when he approached gravitation not as Newton’s attractive property of mass, but as a field of energy. Einstein and Edison are at opposite ends of the innovation spectrum. Einstein was a bona fide genius, a very rare force in history. Edison, by contrast, succeeded by emulating genius. He rationalized innovation, figuring out ways to furnish it on demand. For him, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” was a business model.

We live in singularly interesting times. While the spacing between paradigm shifts is likely to become compressed, the pace of business cannot await even the first signs of the next revolution. Success in business depends on moving along the spectrum of innovation closer to Edison’s evolutionary end and farther from Einstein’s revolutionary edge. The sweet spot is squarely within the space of progressive innovation rather than going all in on the next revolution. Progress is more achievable than paradigm.

Nobody, by the way, has a corner on paradigmatic thinking. Isaac Newton’s notion of gravitation as a property of matter with mass truly opened to contemplation a new universe. The idea that seemingly inert matter possessed a force of gravity was a profound paradigm shift. But could Newton have even imagined Einstein’s new paradigm, of gravity not as a force, but a field that shaped the very universe?

Paradigm shifts, like revolutions, end. Even Einstein’s undoubted genius for invention had bounds. The paradigm he shifted he could shift only so far. He imagined much that defies imagining—the equivalence of mass and energy, the gravitational field, and the space-time continuum—but paradigm became wall when it confronted the emerging science of quantum mechanics, especially “entanglement,” the quantum theory that entangled subatomic particles remain connected so that actions performed on one particle affect another, even when separated by vast distances. Until late in life, Einstein scoffed at this as “spooky action at a distance” and famously countered entanglement by declaring: “God does not play dice with the universe.” So, there are limits to the paradigm-shifting prowess of even history’s heroes of invention.

In a more pragmatic realm, consider the Wright brothers, whom we explore in greater detail in chapter 4. While their invention of manned, powered flight was surely paradigm shifting, the Wright brothers followed their breakthrough with an obsessive rush to prevent further change. Masters of innovation, they succumbed to the plague of incumbency. Their breakthrough success narrowed the field of their insurgent imagination, and they became an upstart startup turned establishment incumbent, using the courts to retard the further development of aviation. Innovators they were, but the Wrights made innovation no part of their business model, which included a barrage of suits meant to tort rival innovators into submission. Their efforts set American aviation technology back twenty or thirty years.

Linear Innovation: Third—Use Agility to

Think, Act, and Plan the Future

Along with the inner conviction that you can innovate, and along with channeling Edison-style systematic innovation, today’s unprecedented business environment demands new levels of agile thinking. Progressive innovation may not aim directly at paradigm shifting, but even less does it cling to the cushy comforts of incumbency. The great University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant symbolized the requisite agile thinking when he described how he recruits great football players: “I want players who are agile, hostile, and mobile.” Agility and mobility proved vital in the building of Bryant’s 323 wins—still a record for college football.

Agile thinking, disruption, and innovation rarely emanate from the status quo. Incumbents are not structured, staffed, or motivated to “think different” precisely because they are the leaders in their categories or marketplaces. Today, change is not fundamentally critical to the incumbent’s current state of survival. They still have their yachts, to which they can retreat to count their treasure.

By contrast, as we argue in chapter 8, today’s insurgent or outsider has never had greater advantage. Because they have no legacy system or model to protect, insurgents are naturally given to agile thinking and are positioned to exploit low-overhead opportunities and the democratization of information, technologies, and platforms. They can afford to attack any market and redress any point of consumer pain. They can afford to drive change by the relative absence of other choices. They have little to lose.

Even in the apparently peaceful valley that lies between outright paradigm shifts, today’s business environment is volatile. The air of tranquility is superficial, hiding the certainty that the incumbent will be disrupted by the insurgent. Lolling on his yacht, the incumbent does not understand that he is cursed. The insurgent, meantime, burning the midnight oil in a studio apartment, relishes his great advantage. As Steve Forbes argues, “You have to disrupt yourself or others will do it for you.”

My position is that you can afford neither to embrace the status quo nor to await a paradigm shift. You must engage in a program of progressive innovation and disruption. To do this requires continually refreshing your perspectives, always putting agile thinking to work. Today’s successful leaders must be vigilant to identify new voices, questions, perspectives, passions, experiments, experts, inputs, and books.

Take, for example, the eminently agile thinking of the sometimes controversial Elon Musk, already one of history’s greatest innovators. He was once asked how he created such groundbreaking companies as SpaceX, Tesla, Inc., OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, SolarCity, Zip2, and PayPal.

“I just started reading books,” he answered.

Innovation is not “out there” any more than the next paradigm shift is “out there.” Innovation begins with innovating your own mind.

In addition to agile thinking driven by curiosity and fed by the acquisition of knowledge, innovation demands cross-disciplines, combining subject-matter expertise and approaches across and among multiple fields. Walter Isaacson, who has written bestselling biographies on innovators, credits cross-field knowledge as the commonality among the likes of Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. Innovation demands mixing your own creative stew, thereby breaking your own status quo patterns and limiting beliefs. You cannot innovate your enterprise without innovating yourself.

But it does not come from nothing. God began (apparently in Latin) with the words Fiat lux—“Let there be light.” God is God. Edison, who was Edison, began not by creating light, but by subdividing it. Over thirty years, in focusing on ways to “think different” in terms of marketing and innovation, my own client work has always begun with one core question: “Where’s the pain?”

Whatever else you have or lack, you can own as your starting point the pain of the consumer. Identify their pain—what bothers them, what hurts them, what they miss, what they long for—address their pain, and the solution can deliver the next billion-dollar IPO to any marketplace.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my work with some of the American firms that became the great American internet companies centered on the founders’ answers to a specific source of consumer pain. In a few cases, such as LinkedIn and Google, the answer delivered not just pain relief but a new inflection point within the business world. These were the paradigmatic movements within the rolling paradigm shift that is the digital transformation. My job was to facilitate innovation within the breakthroughs by helping CEOs and their companies reposition perspectives and change assumptions—in short, to “think different.”

Innovating your mind requires disrupting your own thinking so that you can creatively disrupt your customer’s thinking, your business model, your industry, and the competition. For example:

• Create an “A” and “B” competitive teams to test and rethink your core strategy.

• Devise a “Red Team” exercise to attack and disrupt your own best-laid plans.

• Formulate a variety of “Outsider” sourcing strategies for innovation, creativity, and imagination.

• Above all, focus on the most important consumer-focused question in business: “Where’s the pain?”

But let me pause here, because I am in danger of misleading you. You need to innovate your mind. But essential to this innovation is discovering your customer’s pain. So, this brings the number of people involved in the innovation to two: you and your customer. Still, this is not enough. One of the myths of innovation is that it is the product of some lone genius. The truth is that innovation is never solitary. At minimum, it is an action of two people: you and those whom the innovation will impact. But, as in most endeavors, the minimum is rarely sufficient. One of the fundamental realities of innovation is that innovation takes a team—and not a single-minded team. As General George S. Patton Jr. liked to say, “If everybody is thinking the same way, nobody is thinking.” Innovation requires a widely diverse team to succeed.

My first corporate client, Steve Jobs, was brilliant, no doubt, but he didn’t invent the Macintosh. He didn’t even originate the Macintosh project. Human-computer interface guru Jef Raskin started it. Jobs and Raskin, in turn, were just two members of a team of extraordinary technicians, engineers, and software developers. Jobs was a brilliant visionary, who knew what he wanted and where he needed to point his team to get there. But it was the Macintosh team that turned a disruptive vision into a technological and marketable reality.

Innovate your mind to innovate your company. We need a middle term in this formulation. Innovate your mind to innovate your team to innovate your company.

Jobs pointed his team in the direction where he wanted it to go. Do you know what direction this is? Wipe the beads of sweat off your brow. The answer is self-evident. It is the direction in which success lives. So, reboot your view of what success looks like, and then point your team in the direction of that vision.

Successful innovation demands a clear vision—a sharp definition—of success. We’ve all seen those blooper reels where the heroic wide receiver takes the ball over the goal line—only to discover that he has run in the wrong direction. You must define the correct goal line for your team. You must tell them what it looks like. You must point them toward it.

Do not edit the work of the team. Just keep them pointed the right way. Every effort they make must be made with the same “end” in mind—success—and performance must be judged by metrics that count how much closer the organization is to the correct goal line.

Call it “destination planning.” If an innovation campaign delivers a win, how will everyone know? What are the metrics of this final success and the successes along the way? By what date must success and each intermediate success be delivered? How will key constituents of this innovation relate to each success?

To succeed, each definition must describe how each stakeholder group will think, feel, and behave differently because of each success. “Success” is a sweet and smooth term. Make it sweet and granular by defining success in the most specific and meaningful terms possible—for the organization, for your customers, and for individuals. The context is simple: “If we achieve all our goals over the next twenty-four to thirty-six months, what will our success look and feel like…for us and all our key constituents?”

Write your own answers to these fundamentally important strategic questions:

• What business are we in now—and what business, or businesses, will we be in because of successfully innovating and transforming our company?

• What will be the metrics of our innovation success? For various aspects of the business? For key individuals?

• How will our constituents—employees, management, stakeholders, customers, business media, competitors—think, feel, and behave differently because of our innovation success?

• What will a “battlefield map” look like for us? What, in terms of innovation, are key competitive threats? What are transformational opportunities? What quick gains can be found to generate business momentum?

• When are the key milestones over the next twenty-four to thirty-six months? What is the “By When?” of this innovation campaign?

Stand on the Shoulders of Innovation Giants

So, I said it. Innovation is not a solo endeavor. Below is a hand-selected sampling of strategic questions and answers from other thinkers about innovation. I am not saying that these are essential to everyone all the time, but they are some of my favorites. Steal what works for you.

In Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985), Peter Drucker argues that consumer values and customer values are at the heart of innovative entrepreneurship. He advises entrepreneurial innovators to combine customer/consumer values with these key “sources for innovation opportunity”:

• Unexpected events.

• Incongruities between the expected and the actual.

• New process requirements.

• Unanticipated changes in industry or market structure.

• Demographic changes.

• Changes in perception, mood, or meaning, and new knowledge.

No entrepreneurial innovator can afford not to read every word written by Clayton Christensen, beginning with those in The Innovator’s Dilemma: Why New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997). This Harvard professor argues that even companies that do everything right can fail in their efforts to control and succeed in their markets. Nevertheless, key to success is what he terms “disruptive innovation”—innovation that does not merely add something new to a market, but does something completely unexpected. When you accomplish this, your product does not merely accompany those of your competitors, it displaces and replaces them. In Seeing What’s Next (2004), Christensen offers a pragmatic three-part innovation model:

• First, predict changes in the industry.

• Second, understand the competition and the difficulties they may face.

• Third, determine a company’s longevity.

In his 2016 Competing Against Luck, Christensen disrupts Drucker by arguing that disruptive innovation is not so much about predicting what the customer wants now and will want next, but rather understanding what jobs customers hold now and will hold in the future. The predictive “Jobs to Be Done” structure, Christensen claims, underpins the success of such companies as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Chobani, and many others.

In The Myths of Innovation (2007), Scott Berkun outlines ten innovation myths that demand to be disruptively rethought. They are of such linear and exponential value I will devote the final words of this chapter to him:

• The myth of epiphany—because all ideas come from other ideas, and not all ideas make for success.

• The myth that we know history—given that history is often shaped to fit how we want to see the present.

• The myth of a method—arguing not everything is within our control, and failure happens even if everything is done right.

• The myth we love new ideas—because conservatism often prevails.

• The myth of the lone inventor—given that innovation does not happen in isolation, but rather with the collaboration of teachers, friends, teammates.

• The myth that good ideas are rare—because we are in many ways built for creativity that must be nurtured.

• The myth that your boss knows more than you do—arguing bad bosses focus on conformity, while good ones empower innovation.

• The myth that the best idea wins—given that marketing, politics and other factors help determine what idea succeeds.

• The myth that problems are less interesting than solutions—because a creator must focus on the problem to find solution.

• The myth that innovation is always good—pointing out that all inventions and innovations have caused good for some and bad for others.