The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas by Michael Schrage

Extract

Surprisingly, this was a very difficult book to review. At a first glance it looks like an ‘airport’ book, a book written by a professor of business for the non-specialist market, to promote his or her pet theories. You pick it up at the book stand because your flight has been delayed due to ‘late arrival of the aircraft’, and are attracted by its offer to demonstrate that ‘cheap experiments are worth more than good ideas’. Indeed, the 5 × 5 Rapid Innovation Methodology laid out in the book implies that the process will provide a magic bullet that will solve a business’s problems. So how does a business with an entrenched management culture promote ‘out of the box’ thinking, and how does it harvest and benefit from such thinking?

The word ‘innovation’ is hugely overworked. Every politician, advertising manager, and snake-oil salesman uses the word to describe their activities. Schrage uses the word correctly (at least in a Schumpterian sense), by using the terms ‘innovation, innovator and innovative’ to describe innovation in its true sense: a new product, process, market, source of materials or way of organizing production. Moreover, although he does not say so explicitly, he confirms the proposition that innovators have to be entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs have to be innovators.