[MUSIC]. If you're going to do this thing called "innovation" I recommend, you know, just start small. So often I do these innovation seminars where we get together, we do some projects. And at the beginning, people want to do huge things. And in fact, maybe in this course, in terms of your project, maybe you wanted to do something huge and gigantic. I always say, start small, start really small. If you start with a small project, there's a number of positive things that come out of that. First of all you can use a small budget and so it is easier to find resources. Second of all, if it's, if it, as it works, you are going to consume few resources. So for your big projects you'll have resources remaining available. You get less outside attention. People will come around saying, what are you doing, what are you working on? much less of that if your not working, if you working on the most important thing in the organization everyone is going to come and look and have an opinion about it. But if they, if you're working on something small, they're going to get bored with it, they're going to not look at it from the outside. If it doesn't work you can hide it, you know. That's, there's always value to that, you know, plausible deniability is what we call it. It may be easier to achieve success. Because it's something small, I can actually get it done. And by getting it done then I can understand how my process works. I can, you know debug my process I can work forward in that way. Also present a really reduced risk to limited resources. And so again with these resources I'm using fewer of them but I'm also producing less risk to them, and so people in the organization that care a great deal about the resources are less likely to kind of step in. And, and, and, you know. Begin to change what I'm trying to do. And also if it's a small project, I can get through the entire process more quickly and I can learn through it. So I can learn through the process more quickly by doing some small things. And so I really recommend in your organizations, if you're going to lead an innovation project and lead it in a way that's different than the way that you currently do it, that's starting small, has, pays every kind of benefit back. And to just give me a, a concrete example here, I was working with an organization and they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint in a big way. So, you know, the big boss comes down and says, I need us, we need to reduce our carbon footprint, we're getting hammered about our carbon footprint, let's do this thing. And so, the idea was, this was the operating idea was let's move the administration buildings off the municipal power grid. You know, so where they're getting power in off the grid. And so let's put up solar panels and do all these things to take the building off the grid. Well, this organizations, you know, talked them down, said okay. How can we do this starting small? Let's do a test of that big problem and, and just start small. And so they started with solar lighting. And they're trying to figure out let's just do solar lighting in the parking lot. How about you know, there's a path in the parking lot, let's just do solar lighting there. It's a really small project, this teeny tiny project. Could you possibly do it? Well, they did it. And by doing it they learned that it was technically possible. Okay, so now we know how solar electricity works. We know what we have to do in terms of wiring. But also they learned, that managers had a very different idea of what good is, than others, than, than the people doing the project. They, had very different ideas about who gets to decide about what's good, and what, what gets done. And also what they learned was that they had brought in this person called the director of global innovation, and this person realized that they could not get the project done, even as something as simple as putting lights in the Parking lot, solar lights in the parking lot, had to get the CEO to continually intervene to make this thing happen. So imagine having to start it off into the big project of moving the administration building off the municipal electric grid, it would have created all kinds of problems. So in this small project they're able to see the problems. Right? Create the, and then be able to work through them and understand how it is we're going to work through this, especially when we take on a big project. And so in this case we may have to restructure the organization to make sure that the director of global innovation has the power to do what their being asked to do. That or just ask them to do something different. The other thing is with this managing small and starting with small project is we get to, basically we get to debug the process. You get to work in a controlled environment, you get to work in a controlled context, you are doing a project that you know is manageable, that you know is doable. Work on that, understand the process before we start on these big expensive projects that are really important to the organization that, whose failure will actually mean the difference, you know, in, in terms of your career an what it is you do in those organizations. Another way to help manage risk. Okay. Another way to manage, another way to manage risk in organizations is to build, innovate, what I'm going to call an innovation portfolio. That is a series, a set of things that go together. So portfolio is just a, you know, it's a variety of projects that are in various stages of development. it could be one of these things, it could be multiple projects with different goals, so I have different projects on it, you know, they're all trying to do something different. I can put the one project on it and have multiple approaches in that project or even if I have a big project that I can take the components of that larger project and sort of lay those out and begin to see. So let me show you in a moment lay this out okay. The dimensions of these innovation portfolios. I mean the important things to be thinking about are about time, like how long. You know, what is the window of opportunity? How is this a short term thing, a long term thing? We're going to think about investments. What do I have to actually put in in terms of, you know, the kind of resources that we've talked about in the organization level, you know, time, people, capital, the those things. Then also what are the risk, reward trade offs? You know, how likely are to succeed? Is there a high cost of failure, and what is those costs? And so, normally, in organizations, we may discuss these things, but not in any kind of orderly way. That is, we may have a discussion about them, but the discussion is not, thorough and it's not control and it's not done in a way that actually information is being processed. It's often done in a way that is emotion processing and not information processing. And so this portfolio, that this idea that, that we've developed is a way to look at the relationships among the innovation projects. So, let me just go put up here and show you, in the horizontal axis. That is, you know, across the bottom, we have the time horizon. You know, is it short term, over there, or is it a really long term thing? And so, just think of things that go, are long term or things that are short term. And then in terms of the return, are we expecting a low return or are we expecting a high return? And so the idea here is that you compare the return. And it basically the value of this concept in terms of how long it's going to take you to, to realize that value to get the return from it. And so how long will it be and will it be high return or low returns? So what you could do is actually lay out your projects. And so put your projects in here and sort of say, you know, are these short term projects, long term projects? In a situation like this, you might ask, well, how come we don't have any sort of these, you know, high competitive sort of short term, strategic projects, that would have high return? And it may be that maybe you just misplaced the ones that are there, or maybe you could have a nice conversation about saying what is the nature of projects that would go, in that quadrant up there? And, if you end up with, with projects sort of relative to the others that end up in sort of a questionable quadrant. You might ask, why would we be doing that? Why does that make sense to us to do? Maybe there is a way, I mean questionable just means it's questionable. but likely there's not a good reason to have a lot of your projects down here. Also, if all of your projects are in one quadrant, you ask, well why are we stuck in this quadrant? Why aren't we thinking long term? Why aren't we thinking strategic? Or maybe you have too many radical adapters, too many radical innovators on my team, and all the projects are up in this, you know, up here in the strategic, you know, long term high return Quadrant. I say well aren't there things we can do in the short term, to move forward? And I like these maps because what you could do is you can sit people around the table and have each person, basically the idea is each person puts down the projects where they think they are and then you compare maps. So do it individually and then compare maps and see in there's a conversation that evolves will be a very nice conversation about managing, how it is we do our portfolio as a whole.
