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

When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.

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.

The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.

Some people who were central to former success aren't the right people for your future success.

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.