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A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.

Scott D. Anthony

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Scott D. Anthony
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: February 22
Watching
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Innovation
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More quotes by Scott D. Anthony

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Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).
Scott D. Anthony
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The need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won't come naturally to many people inside huge companies.
Scott D. Anthony
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So many people tell me that they aren't creative or they aren't innovative, and it's just not true.
Scott D. Anthony
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Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.
Scott D. Anthony
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It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.
Scott D. Anthony
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One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.
Scott D. Anthony
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If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.
Scott D. Anthony
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Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.
Scott D. Anthony
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People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.
Scott D. Anthony
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It's very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea.
Scott D. Anthony
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Have a core concept, but wrap it in a full business model.
Scott D. Anthony
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Of course if you are launching a new business you can thinking about revenues, profits, and so on, but metrics such as customer satisfaction or employee retention might be meaningful if you are focusing more internally.
Scott D. Anthony
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If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.
Scott D. Anthony
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Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.
Scott D. Anthony
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It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.
Scott D. Anthony
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I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.
Scott D. Anthony
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I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.
Scott D. Anthony
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Small teams move faster than big teams.
Scott D. Anthony
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I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.
Scott D. Anthony
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Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market.
Scott D. Anthony