Page 91 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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extend the process over months. We recommend making a first
pass quickly, say, in a day or two. Cycle through the process
once, then return after you’ve learned more and iterate, taking
more time the second time around. Innovation is a highly path-
dependent process. The more focused on one path you become,
the more difficult it will be to shift gears when you get new
information. At some point you’ll need to have everyone driv-
ing in the same direction, but for goodness sake, don’t lock in
that direction too early. We see this all too often. Someone in
the company comes up with a good idea and starts to pursue
it, but in doing so, the person focuses on an initial hunch rather
than exploring perhaps even better market opportunities.
Being too focused early on causes people to ignore or dismiss
information that does not fit. Leave plenty of time to iterate
and try multiple paths. Your eventual business system design
is bound to be more competitive.
For critical new product programs, Toyota Motor Corpora-
tion assigns multiple parallel design teams to develop various
visions of the product. The company later selects among them
and incorporates insights from each into the final product.
Clearly this is a more costly process, but keep in mind that
development costs in the early design stages are relatively
small compared to the resource commitments later in the
design process. Toyota finds its ultimate outcomes to be vastly
improved, as the competitive process brings more alternatives
to the surface and brings forward more disparate knowledge
in the early stages, when the project concept is more malleable.
The same can be said for new business design. Although most
companies do not have the resources to assign parallel teams
to the same project, allowing business design teams the oppor-
tunity to iterate early on employs similar wisdom.