Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

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.

Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.

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.

Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.