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Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

Eric Ries

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Eric Ries
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 22
Author
Entrepreneur
Writer
Doesn
Cannot
Mean
Decentralized
Thing
Bottoms
Unpredictable
Managed
Innovation
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As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or was not covered due to rescission.
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What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.
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Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.
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Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer' anything else is waste.
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Most companies are busy making their products worse, not better. Updating is almost always a disaster.
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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.
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Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
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All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.
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If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.
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A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode-away from customers-is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
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We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
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The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
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This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
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Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
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Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.
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Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.
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A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
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The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.
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Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
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