Innovating Innovation

57 ACTION STEPS CHECKLIST

Get action. Drawn from all the pages of Innovating Innovation, here is a checklist of 57 ways to make bold persistent innovation happen.

➢ Remember, Perceptions Rule: Begin with the way customers see their world.

➢ Drive Toward Cumulative Success: Direct a series of focused, disciplined, and doable steps.

➢ Be Different or Be Damned: Find and leverage what makes you unique, special, and better.

➢ Innovate Forward: Skate to where the puck is going to be. Move ahead of the marketplace.

➢ Transform Business: Open your aperture to reevaluate and innovate your own business model.

➢ Everything Communicates: Therefore, herd even the tiniest details in the same direction of your strategy.

➢ Control Context: Test, recognize, understand, and—even better—control the larger context of what you do.

➢ Protect the Downside: Surface problems, create limited trials and test markets, and always prepare a Plan B.

➢ Under-promise/Over-deliver: Define expectation, over-deliver against this definition, and then claim success.

➢ Think Anew: Challenge assumptions, disrupt the status quo, and think anew.

➢ Ask Questions: Go to chapter 1 and review the five strategic questions that drove Apple’s turnaround. Repeat this review as needed.

➢ Commit to a Way of Thinking: Outperform every competitor by sheer persistence and resilience.

➢ Think Innovation, Not Invention: Channel Edison by driving step-by-step inductive prototypes and progress.

➢ Think, Plan, and Imagine the Future: Use the destination planning in chapter 2 to imagine and define the win.

➢ Stand on the Shoulders of Giants: Study the innovation classics and adapt their lessons for you, for today.

➢ Fruit Stand Your Ideas: Use small-scale models to test new products, services, models, and businesses.

➢ Prototype from the Bottom Up: Create new things by getting your hands dirty with your collaborators in your workshop.

➢ Learn by Doing: Take actions faster than you think you should. Take actions immediately.

➢ Try Everything: Follow Edison’s model of whittling down and throwing multiple solutions at problems.

➢ Capture all Ideas: Sketch out and write it down. Make your notebooks your golden reference points.

➢ Use Problems as Gifts: Transform problems into opportunities. Find their upside.

➢ Exploit Disaster: Treat crisis as opportunity. Steal inertia from it.

➢ Build a War Room: Focus and centralize strategy and tactics. Concentrate on driving innovation.

➢ Go Bold: Work exponential opportunities and focus on “What?” and “Why?” more than “How?”

➢ Model Success: Breakthroughs leave clues. Study, imitate, and channel your innovation predecessors.

➢ Learn, Measure, and Account: Validate learning by frequent experiments. Measure only what really matters.

➢ Brainstorm: Design your workshop to promote continuous, relentless, change-focused thinking.

➢ Train Creativity: Rely on spontaneity, foment curiosity, ask “Why?” and jump in fast.

➢ Think Faster: Observe, orient, decide, and take actions more quickly and with more agility than your enemy.

➢ Play Offense: Set an example of bold initiative, create a bias for action, and sustain the attack.

➢ Disrupt Proactively: Think different. Get out into the creative periphery. Skunk Works yourself.

➢ Get Away: Go find your cottage in the woods, your place of creative isolation far from distraction. Drive change there.

➢ Challenge Assumptions: Disrupt your thinking with new inputs, angles, mentors, models, and “rules.”

➢ Think 6 Cs: Position around Control, Choice, Change, Customization, Convenience, and Connection.

➢ Build Brand: Presence, relevance, differentiation, credibility, and imagery.

➢ Be Insurgent: Value discovery, craft, authenticity, vision, and un-marketing.

➢ Research Benefits: Work the ten steps in chapter 6 to stay ahead of your customers and defeat your competitors.

➢ Shape Details: Do an “everything communicates” audit and unleash marketing and branding.

➢ Prepare Luck: Get one step ahead. Look for happy accidents and proactively line up their exploitation.

➢ Use Crisis: Do not let crisis use you. Learn instead from the worst. Ride its momentum forward.

➢ Lead Change: Strategically anticipate, exploit, and ride change forward as opportunity.

➢ Define Success: Imagine boldly and precisely what the win looks like. Aim everyone toward that vision.

➢ Move Faster: Adopt a change leader culture to exploit more speed, agility, and momentum than your enemy.

➢ Build Momentum: Run for openings, do the doable, and move the moveable to build inertia and success.

➢ Control Dialogue: Use change and consumer hunger for control, customization, and convenience to lead the debate.

➢ Communicate Inside-Out: Win over your internal audience. Use them as the amplifier of your change leadership.

➢ Attack Always: Never play defense. Awaken your inner insurgent to drive relentlessly forward.

➢ Assume Leadership: Change leadership is not awarded. It must be won on purpose.

➢ Shape Success: Define yourself. Define change in terms of an Election Day. Define the future of your industry.

➢ Focus Communications: Prepare, practice, and perform your “3 x 5 Card” and stump speech.

➢ Think “Campaign”: You are the candidate and must therefore plan, prepare, launch, and run a leadership campaign.

➢ Win Hearts and Minds: Ensure that people truly believe and feel they belong, and they can make a difference.

➢ Prepare Internally: Feed mind, body, and spirit to awaken your inner insurgent for the battles ahead.

➢ Set Deadlines: Innovation needs a deadline. And cultures need an Election Day. Mark them down in permanent ink.

➢ Jump In: Channel Edison to immediately begin workshopping innovation by playing with it.

➢ Channel Agile Software Development: Model best practices in cooperation, agility, and simplicity.

➢ Surge Forward: Seize opportunity by loading up, concentrating effort, and punctuating your equilibrium.