The reality is sometimes markets don't exist for very good reasons. It might be that there isn't a deep customer need. Or the economic model is just hard to pull off. Or maybe there is a regulatory barrier.

Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

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.

It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.

Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear.

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

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.