Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.

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.

Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.

The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

The number one thing I urge people to remember is it is all about being scientific about managing strategic uncertainty, while striking the important balance between being thorough and being flexible.