6 valleys of death in strategy & innovation
Strategy and innovation power strong businesses. But there are 6 key moments where things fall off the rails.
Testing and learning, pivoting, or iterating?
Those are all normal, important ways to adapt to real-time developments and insights – like taking a detour because of construction, but still getting where you’re trying to go.
These gaps 👇 are more equivalent to combusting in the middle of a highway.
Think of your innovation journey as a rope bridge. It:
starts with strategy,
ends with some sort of (hopefully) business-changing innovation, and
has multiple steps (wooden planks) bridging the two.
Your stages (the individual wooden planks) might vary based on your company and team culture, size, stage, etc.
But I'll bet that these "valleys of death" (the gaps between those individual planks) feel mighty familiar.
So you HAVE to have the right information, people, and processes in place to help you hop from plank to plank.
As we turn from annual planning to executing on those plans, it's worth a pause to consider:
Where do your team's efforts tend to break down?