In this episode, we are joined by Luis Perez-Breva, a lecturer and research scientist at MIT’s School of Engineering and the Director of MIT’s Innovation Teams Program. Luis has extensive experience in both innovation practice - via his involvement in multiple startups - and innovation research - through his academic work.
We are talking about his first book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong.
What Was Covered
- Why Luis sees following “innovation recipes” is inherently wasteful and essentially high stakes gambling
- How the best innovators both prepare for scale at each stage and excel at applying their “parts” to identified problems
- How a corporation’s existing products and services give it an innovation advantage over startups
Key Takeaways and Learnings
- Luis’s tried and tested method, anticipating failure at each ‘scale’, which can help innovators to prepare and solve as many foreseeable faults as possible - what he calls being “productively wrong” as a way to avoid “failing predictively”
- How to use linear processes to improve the non-linear process of building innovation
- Innovating the skillset; how companies learn and repurpose what they do today to provide entirely different products in the future
Links and Resources Mentioned in This Podcast