The First Mile

CHAPTER 8

Systems to Support Strategic Experimentation

While detailed data on the success rate of corporate innovation efforts is difficult to obtain, most executives agree that the overwhelming majority of their investments in growth prove disappointing.

The fundamental challenge inside most companies is that the core systems are optimized around supporting today’s business model, not developing tomorrow’s. Those systems act like corporate antibodies that snuff out strategic experiments—not through malice, but simply through attempting to keep the enterprise humming along without getting distracted.¹ Four specific systems can inoculate the corporate innovator against these antibodies:²

1. Decision-making systems that pierce through the “fog ...