March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
6h 9m
English
Content preview from The Lean Enterprise: How Corporations Can Innovate Like StartupsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 5
Vision
The Innovation Thesis
An innovation colony is designed to develop innovation opportunities into products with a ready market. But which opportunities? What criteria can a colony use to decide which opportunities to pursue and which to reject at the port of entry? The answer depends on the colony's innovation thesis.
Your innovation thesis is a statement of the range of ideas you're interested in supporting. It describes an area of the market that you've identified as a fulcrum of growth over a particular time period (say, the coming five years), and it summarizes the beliefs that drive your decisions to incubate a particular idea, invest in a certain company, or acquire a certain startup.
Many investors use a similar tool known as an investment thesis, and that's essentially the same thing. For example, Union Square Ventures' blog encapsulates its investment thesis as: “Large networks of engaged users, differentiated through user experience, and defensible through network effects.” (The complete thesis statement, which is quite lengthy, can be found online.) This statement directs the firm toward businesses with a focus on user experience and network effects that might drive immense scale.
It's important to differentiate a thesis from a theme. A theme is a broad space such as an industry (education, health care, petrochemicals), a technology (mobile, social, or cloud), or a platform (iOS or Android). It doesn't say anything about the dynamics that affect that field. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.