In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can't cash a spreadsheet.

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

I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.

Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.