The problem for startups and large companies alike is that employees often follow the products they develop as they move from phase to phase. A common practice is for the inventor of a new product or feature to manage the subsequent resources, team, or division that ultimately commercializes it. As a result, strong creative managers wind up getting

The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit.

Companies have a strong incentive to align their PR stories around the heroic founder and make it seem that their success was the inevitable result of a good idea.

Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects.

A pivot is better understood as a new strategic hypothesis that will require a new minimum viable product to test.

In other words, which of our efforts are value-creating and which are wasteful?

customer behavior—on the viral loop—and safely ignore those that do not. Such a startup does not need to specialize in marketing, advertising, or sales functions. Conversely, a company using the paid engine needs to develop those marketing and sales functions urgently.

The effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be eliminated.

The challenge here is to create a mechanism for empowering innovation teams out in the open. This is the path toward a sustainable culture of innovation over time as companies face repeated existential threats. My suggested solution is to create a sandbox for innovation that will contain the impact of the new innovation but not constrain the method