The Innovator's Pledge

IdeaConnection Interview with Scott D. Anthony, Author of The Little Black Book of Innovation and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, of Innosight Innovation is, "Something different that has impact." The Little Black Book of Innovation, page 16

Vern Burkhardt (VB): In The Little Black Book of Innovation you say, "...the new normal is perpetual change." Is building this thinking into our business practices one of the secrets to success?

Scott D. Anthony: It absolutely is. It's a big shift from even five years ago – certainly from 10 or 15 years ago – where we could quite safely have a business built around an idea of continual improvement, optimization, and carefully planned expansion. In today's world, where competitive advantage disappears in an instant, we have to organize, act, and think differently. It's incredibly important to imbed this in our individual minds and in the collective minds of organizations as well.

VB: Does this mean everyone in an organization must have this imbedded within their minds?

Scott D. Anthony: Yes, to different degrees.

If you're in a large organization there are a number of people who have to wake up every day and go to sleep every night knowing their role is to be sure the core engine keeps running. You don't ever want them to forget this, but they need to also understand that business and customer needs are changing, and their jobs are also changing. This is an important awareness for them to have.

VB: Of the 12 Masters of Innovation which you include in your book, if someone only had time to read the works of one, which Master would you recommend and why?

Scott D. Anthony: I'm heavily biased based on my history so it's probably not a surprise that I'm going to say Clayton Christensen. He has a gift for bringing order to seemingly complicated topics, and for giving people relatively simple but high-impact ways to frame up problems. His writing is also very accessible.

Now, truth in advertising, he was the cofounder of Innosight, we've written a book together, and we've been friends for more than a decade so I wear my biases quite openly. But Christensen is the one I would recommend.

VB: "Leaders trying to ignite innovation have to move from rewarding innovation outcomes to rewarding behaviors consistent with successful innovation." This seems to be a key piece of advice. Would you talk a bit about it?

Scott D. Anthony: This is one of the biggest challenges that I see in almost every organization. It comes down to what we think is the role of luck versus skill in innovation. This is something that Michael Mauboussin, one of the 12 Innovation Masters in my book, is talking about. In fact, his next book is precisely on this topic: luck versus skill. Mauboussin observes that when hitting a baseball, or making an investment where there is some uncertainty, risk, and luck involved, you can't just look at the achievement or outcome to know whether or not someone is good over the long term. Over enough 'at bats' or investments, yes. But for any single time you want to look at the process and behaviors they follow.

Innovation is a lot like hitting a baseball or making investments. There is certainly skill involved, but for any given idea there is risk, uncertainty, and unpredictability. A good idea can fail. A bad idea can succeed. And because of this, if you don't watch how people make decisions or the behaviors they follow, you can draw the wrong conclusions about who is skilled and who is unskilled at innovation.

VB: Persistence pays off?

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. The more at bats you get the greater your chances of success.

Larry Bird, a former American NBA basketball player and coach, once said – sorry for the basketball reference – you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. There is huge value in making sure you get the equivalent of enough at bats to be able to get enough successes in innovation. At any given time, fortune could smile upon you and a mediocre idea could succeed, but, all things being equal, I'd bet on the person who was following the behaviors consistent with success.

VB: How can large organizations know when they need to overcome what you call the "sucking sound of the core business when pursuing innovation?"

Scott D. Anthony: The basic, simple litmus test is the degree to which you're doing something that's different. Einstein defined insanity as following the same process and expecting different results. If you expect a different result, such as going into a new market, targeting a new customer, using a new business model, or leveraging a different form of technology, you have to be careful that what appears in your organization to be a core capability doesn't end up being a strait-jacket. This is what I call 'the sucking sound of the core'.

Any time you're doing something that is a departure from the past, your guard should go up. You have to carefully watch to make sure you don't unintentionally end up doing what you have done before, as almost with certainty it won't give you the new results that you're seeking.

VB: In your experience do senior executives understand this?

Scott D. Anthony: Senior executives are smart people. They can understand this at a conceptual, abstract level. That said, they make a whole series of decisions that unintentionally lead to the infiltration of the core's DNA into new growth businesses. I'd say the single biggest thing they have to be careful about is resisting the pressure to have a new business get very big, very fast.

Research by The Startup Genome found that the number one reason start-ups fail is premature scaling. Large companies succumb to this problem all the time, and it makes it very hard to do things differently.

VB: They overcapitalize and promise early profits to shareholders.

Scott D. Anthony: They build a team of employees that is too big, and give too much funding to product development and sales.

They try to put the foot on the gas pedal before they know where they're going to go. When you do this, the car can unintentionally slam right into a brick wall.

VB: Would you talk about the 'innovator's paradox'?

Scott D. Anthony: The innovator's paradox, which appears squarely in Day 1 of my 28-day Innovation Program, is pretty simple. The notion is when you've got the freedom to change you don't follow the right behaviors to make change. When you desperately need the change, you don't have the freedom to follow the right behaviors. The paradox is when you need innovation you can't do it. When you can do innovation you don't feel you need it.

For example, when a business is booming and healthy – like Microsoft was 10 or 12 years ago – there is lots of cash flow to invest in innovation. However, because you feel no sense of urgency you don't always follow the right processes and practices for innovation. Then, when the urgency increases and you desperately need it, such as when the core business is in a bit of trouble or shareholders are getting upset, you no longer have the degrees of freedom to follow the right behaviors. It's a really tricky part of innovation.

This is why Kodak declared bankruptcy earlier this year. It's why large, historically great companies seem to so frequently miss innovation – they get caught in this paradox.

VB: Xerox and IBM were examples of this at one time.

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. Both fell prey to this paradox, but to the credit of both of those organizations they have managed to do some pretty impressive things over the past decade.

Xerox is an interesting comparison with Kodak because they are both companies that have historical legacies in imaging. Xerox appears to be driving a pretty successful transformation whereas obviously Kodak has not managed to do so.

VB: When talking about 'discovering opportunities' you say, "The goal is to move from the solution to the problem, because deep understanding of the problem can make the solution obvious." In your experience is this a common failing of companies?

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. The Harvard Business School defines entrepreneurship as "the pursuit of opportunities, regardless of the resources one controls." To put it into simple terms, whenever you see opportunity, you figure out how you're going to make it work.

Companies typically start by saying, "I've got this thing, technology, widget, brand, or business model. What do I do with it?" It's not necessarily a bad question to ask, but this can often blind you to the biggest growth opportunity.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon put it very well when he said, "If you want to continuously reinvent the service you offer, you cannot keep asking, what are you good at? Instead you have to ask, What does the customer need or want?" No matter how hard it is you've got to get good at the things your customers need or want.

VB: You say that sometimes a customer-first perspective highlights 'nonobvious' opportunities; other times 'nonobvious' competitive threats. Are there times when a customer-first perspective may not be the best approach for innovation?

Scott D. Anthony: It's useful to keep in mind Steve Job's observation, "It's not the customer's job to know what they want."
I always caution people from making a common mistake, which is simply going to customers and asking them, 'What do you want?" Here I completely agree with Jobs. Customers cannot accurately answer this question.

I don't suggest that people never take what customers say and use this information as the basis to make decisions. What I mean is if you show an idea to customers and 83% of them reply, "Yes, I like it" or "No, I don't like it," it's dangerous to proceed on the basis of this finding. Until a customer actually gets a chance to play with something, view it, buy it, or look good with it, they are not adept at accurately projecting what they're going to do with it. This is one area where you have to be thoughtful about what customer first means. You certainly listen to customers, but you also have to know how to ignore what they're saying.

VB: Customers don't know what they are missing.

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. Who could have exactly predicted what people were going to do with motion on their screens and a little bird flying out and hitting bricks to free pigs? If you heard somebody describe it to you, your conclusion would be, 'Well that's just a bit whacky'. Until you've played Angry Birds and realize others are also playing it, you might respond that you would never think of playing it as a game. It's the same for any form of new technology, like the iPhone or iPad.

VB: "There is such a thing as too good." Given this, does it surprise you that the strategy followed by many companies is to try to compete by providing ever more complex and difficult to use products?

Scott D. Anthony: It doesn't surprise me particularly when you study the research of Clayton Christensen. This was the cornerstone of his landmark work, The Innovator's Dilemma.

When companies do this they're not doing anything 'bad' per se. They're doing what you would be taught in many business schools, which is find your best customers, talk to them, figure out what they want, innovate to meet those needs, and deliver those products to the marketplace. As Christensen found, though, in every market there comes a point where you begin to overshoot or provide too much choice for the market.

The challenge with this is that overshooting doesn't tend to start with the core or most demanding customers. It's your least demanding customers that you overshoot first. When this begins to set in it's easy for a company to say, "Well, I didn't want those customers anyway. They were our worst customers. We don't care about them. It's great that they left us."

There are a lot of pathologies for why this is a natural thing for companies to do. However, they need to be mindful of it because, when overshooting sets in, this is when things begin to change and sometimes change very rapidly.

VB: Instead of striving for too good should they instead strive for disruptive innovation?

Scott D. Anthony: Sometimes you can make the world very complicated, or you can make the world very simple. Balance is almost always a good thing. When it comes to innovation, if all you do is sustain your current business and try to incrementally improve what you have, it's not a good thing. If all you do is try to disrupt and create new markets, this is not a good thing either because you're missing opportunities to optimize and grow your business.

A good leader thinks about how to have a balanced portfolio where some and perhaps a large part of the company's efforts are directed at sustaining, expanding, and extending today's business. But at least some of efforts must be focused on reinventing, creating, and driving the building of the business in areas that will become the strength of tomorrow's business. Just about every company should have at least a portion of its efforts focusing on disruption.

VB: In your consulting experience, do you find that entrepreneurs have not taken the time to clearly document their business models?

Scott D. Anthony: I find in many cases they haven't; as entrepreneurs, they're so busy doing and creating that they don't always stop to really assess their models.

Sometimes you discover things that were unanticipated, and big businesses are born because of this. That said, there is now enough understanding about what constitutes a business model because of the good research and writings of my colleague, Mark Johnson, and also of our affiliate, Alexander Osterwalder. You can use some easily accessible tools to go through the different components of your business model. Almost always the people I've seen do this discover something which they didn't anticipate.

Certainly sometimes you get lucky, but it seems wiser to use simple ways to document your business model in order to increase the chances you will focus your luck in the right sorts of places. It's not hard to do it, and almost always, good things result from the disciplined approach to business model innovation.

(Vern's Note: See my interview with Mark Johnson and interview with Alexander Osterwalder.

VB: Sometimes entrepreneurs' frantic activities are wasteful and potentially catastrophic.

Scott D. Anthony: This is an important and often overlooked point. We celebrate the activities done by entrepreneurs, but honestly there's a lot of waste. There's a lot of destruction as well.

The statistics show that about 80% of venture capital backed start-ups don't celebrate their third birthday. You might just say this is just the way it is – 80% of businesses are doomed to fail. I don't accept that. If people are a little bit more thoughtful and focused in the beginning, we can dramatically increase new businesses' success rate, which means resources are being used more effectively.

VB: It's important to take the time to plan your implementation.

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. I'm not suggesting that people should spend months, years, or decades planning. It honestly can be a half-day. It requires having the right tools at your disposal and having the discipline to say, 'What exactly is it we're trying to do?" "What is a fact?" "What is an assumption?" You need to figure out ways to test the assumptions.

There are a lot of great tools available from the writings of people like Rita McGrath, Peter Sims, Eric Ries, and Steve Blank, which can help you to do this in a systematic way. It doesn't have to be overwhelming.

VB: In your blog entry in Harvard Business Review on March 11, 2011 you identify nine ways to test an entrepreneurial idea. Are any of these most often overlooked?

Scott D. Anthony: As I look back on that list I would say the one thing people miss the most, which is honestly one of the easiest things to do, is looking for relevant analogies. There's a line that I have in The Little Black Book – it's not my line, it's Pablo Picasso's – "Good artists copy and great artists steal."

One of the mistakes innovators often make is they think they get bonus points for doing things that are more difficult, or doing things that no one has ever done before. That's not right. You get bonus points by driving to market impact. If you can find a way to short-circuit the path to impact, by all means do it.

If you follow Picasso's advice, you look for the analogy. Who else has faced a similar problem? You can bet someone in the world has already stared down the problem you're trying to solve. Maybe it's in a different industry, maybe a different company, or maybe a different country. Try to find the most relevant analogy and learn from it. It can be a 30-minute exercise, but it's a very quick way to learn more about your idea.

VB: When talking about Dartmouth College's daily newspaper 'The D', you say: "My team at The Dartmouth and I had a chance to use the Internet to rethink our business, and we completely blew it. The opportunity was there. And we missed it." With the benefit of hindsight what do you think you should have done, and why did you miss seeing this opportunity?

Scott D. Anthony: What we could have or should have done was pretty limitless. We had a couple of guys from Stanford who gave the world Google. We had a guy from Harvard who gave the world Facebook. Our team at Dartmouth gave the world a pixel-for-pixel, word-for-word replication of a print newspaper online.

What could we have done? Anything. We could have done things that turned out to be LinkedIn, Groupon, Google, or anything else. This was 1995. The world was a blank slate. There are all sorts of different things we could have developed.

You know, we got involved in the same challenges that afflict many companies. We looked at the world through the frame of our existing business. We didn't ask what we could do differently, but instead asked how we could use the Internet to enhance the business model that drove the print version of our newspaper. This led to replication and to us using the Internet as a way to search for new subscribers, as opposed to creating new businesses.

One of the things I've learned after studying and working in this field for the past decade is the challenges which executives face are natural. I felt them myself 17 or 18 years ago now. Unless you've got the right tools at your disposal, this is the natural outcome.

What I'm trying to do, and what we're trying to do at Innosight, is show businesses that there is another way. There are other outcomes that smart executives can get to.

VB: It means not trying to protect the status quo but rather taking advantage of change and new technologies to reinvent your business.

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely, and this is one of the things Richard Foster first identified in his 1986 book, Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage. He is one of the Innovation Masters in my book, on Innosight's Board of Directors, and a good friend.

If you have looked at the behavioral psychology research, you'll be aware of the phenomenon of loss aversion – when you've got something, then you've got something to lose. Entrepreneurs have nothing to lose, so they look at a blank sheet of paper and decide what to do. Established business people, on the other hand, look at a potential initiative and think about what impact it will have on current offerings. This immediately changes your options, often in a negative way.

VB: You have spent a lot of time with Clayton Christensen. What are the 2 or 3 things you have learned from him that stand out in your mind?

Scott D. Anthony: Two immediately come to mind.

Number one, when you see a company or business struggling start with an assumption that the people who are running the business or company are smart, well-intentioned people. This is a very different framing than most people follow. When they see a company that is struggling; for example, when they see Kodak go into bankruptcy, they say, "Well the problem is stupid management."

In reality, from spending time with a large number of different companies, I have observed that the people who run these companies and make mistakes that are obvious in hindsight are smart. They're well intentioned. They're trying desperately to do the right thing. The Christensen framing is to try to understand why smart people do things, which in hindsight were clearly the wrong things to do. This is an important framing to always have in mind.

The second thing I've learned from Professor Christensen is to try to understand causal mechanisms. He is passionate about trying to get people to use good theory. In his mind, good theory identifies the different circumstances people are facing and tries to come up with statements of causality. If you are in situation A and you do X, Y will result for Z reason. This mind-set of always looking for the categories and the causality helps bring clarity to complicated problems.

VB: Do you still apply those lessons today?

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. The thing that is so powerful about Clayton's work is these aren't just tools for use in your business life. They're things that can help you better live your personal life as well.

He's got a book coming out in May 2012 that I think will be very well received. It's called, How Will You Measure Your Life? and it's much more of a personal book, talking about how you can be a good parent, spouse, and co-worker. It's a very interesting read. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is thinking about being a better person, which I hope most people are thinking about.

VB: How would you describe the business ethic in Singapore, and their approach to innovation?

Scott D. Anthony: Singapore is a fascinating market because Singapore has a well-deserved reputation for being an incredibly efficient and transparent place, which is a departure from some other Asian countries. What is interesting is there was a belief, particularly 5 or 10 years ago that because Singapore is so process-driven and efficiency oriented, there was little place for innovation. But if you accept the premise behind all of the work that Innosight and Clay Christensen have done, which says that innovation is a discipline, skill, and process, a place like Singapore is ideal for innovation.

There are some things organizations in Singapore have to unlearn in order to succeed with innovation, but I do think there's much more congruence between innovation and the Singaporean ecosystem than many might have perceived. We're doing what we can to help with that unlearning to allow this city and this region to realize all of it's potential, and I tell you its potential is pretty darn immense.

VB: The potential is ever increasing?

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. It's interesting. I have the good fortune to be able to travel fairly extensively in my job, and I get to see what's going on in places like Bangkok, Bangalore, Shanghai, Seoul, and cities in Australia, and other parts of this region. The energy that you feel in the Asia Pacific area, and the belief that the next century is really going to be an awesome one, is palpable.

In contrast, in North America and Europe right now there's not quite the same sense of vibrancy. I'm an American at heart. I love the United States, Canada, and Europe. I've lived in London. I've travel across North America. These are places that have a tremendous amount still to offer the world. I hope everybody can continue to look forward with a sense of optimism because we need a lot of creativity to solve a lot of big problems.

VB: Optimism and a sense of a positive future will tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Scott D. Anthony: Absolutely. Yesterday I was talking to an Indian company we're working with, and when you look at what they are trying to do you say, "It is impossible." That's the thing I love about entrepreneurs. They look at something which you say is impossible and they say, "Well, that's just a challenge to be overcome."

If you're an optimist, you can use the concept of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field to your benefit. You will do things that historically people have said were impossible. If you're a pessimist you will never try, so things will never change, and you'll have a downward spiral. I'm all for optimism and believing that the impossible is doable.

VB: In your experience what can North Americans and Europeans learn from business practices in Singapore and other parts of Asia?

Scott D. Anthony: True innovation occurs at the intersections where you get different disciplines, mindsets, and approaches coming together. This comes up in research findings again and again.

What I am observing and finding of great interest in the Asia Pacific right now is, while there's been a lot of borrowing over the past 20 or 30 years of Western management practices, in localized regions there have been twists. There have been improvisations. People have been doing things in their own ways.

India, in particular, is a good example. The notion of Jugaad, where at the grassroots level people are finding creative ways to work around problems and overcome constraints, has become a hotbed for people coming up with very innovative solutions. Often these are creative workarounds. The thing that North Americans and Europeans can learn is there are different ways to organize and solve problems.

As a businessperson you cannot understand these things unless you go to these places and personally experience the markets. It's the single biggest piece of advice that I give North American and European executives who are thinking about what to do in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. Buy a plane ticket and come to the markets. Don't just stay in a secluded 5-star hotel. Get out into the real parts of the market and experience it a little bit, because until you have seen it with your own eyes and felt it with your own hands you don't really get it. You don't understand the market you are hoping to serve.

VB: What lessons can Singaporeans and others in Asia Pacific learn from North America and Europe when it comes to innovation?

Scott D. Anthony: The single biggest thing is to have a tolerance for prudent risk-taking and failure. If I were to offer one criticism of the Singaporean ecosystem it is that it's hard to fail in Singapore. The government is wise but the government will sometimes prop things up for too long.

Companies will organize in ways which make sure that everything they do will succeed. This means they over-study a situation or business opportunity, and extensively test their assumptions before they do anything. The reality is that innovation is a little bit messy and a little bit unpredictable. Sometimes things don't work the way you want, and sometimes this is the best thing about it. The unanticipated is often the true innovation.

The one thing I try to counsel people locally is to embrace a willingness to be smart about encouraging risk-taking and living with a little bit of failure. It doesn't mean that you need to devolve into chaos, but it does mean you have to encourage more experimentation and risk-taking.

VB: Do you have any other comments about how innovation works and how to do it?

Scott D. Anthony: I offer one final comment, and I'll use a metaphor from my son and his effort to learn to ride a bike. The definition I use for innovation, which is in The Little Black Book of Innovation, is simple, "Something different that has impact." The most important part of this definition is the first word, "something". If you want to do something different that has impact, you have to do something.

As an example, last year my now 6-year old son, Charlie, announced he wanted to learn to ride a bike. We could have read about it, watched YouTube videos, and studied the theory all we wanted. But until Charlie got on the bike, began to pedal, fell down and got back up, he knew nothing about riding a bike. Today he's a proficient bike rider. He can get from point A to point B, and I'm confident that if he keeps practicing he'll be a skilled bike rider. Whether he'll be a Lance Armstrong, I don't know.

For innovators, the number one thing they need to do is get on their bike and try some things. They might fall down, but the act of doing is the only way we really learn what does and doesn't work.

VB: Is your 28-day Innovation Program, which you describe in The Little Black Book of Innovation, something everyone should follow?

Scott D. Anthony: Yes, the notion behind the program is the same as getting into an exercise regime or trying to make any kind of habit change. If you do something every day for about a month it sticks, and you keep doing it. So the notion of the 28-day program is to make it simple for people to have an everyday way to practice with innovation.

And because the way we work, live, play, and communicate is changing we need to learn innovation skills. Even if you're not tasked with coming up with a new product, brand, or business model for your company, and even if you're just trying to figure out how to communicate with your kids and friends, having skills around innovation is an important thing for everyone to have. So I do suspect and suggest that everyone can benefit from following the program.

Conclusion:
The 28-day Innovation Program will set us up to discover opportunities, blueprint ideas, assess and test these innovative ideas, and move forward with success. It will ensure we have the right mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, author Scott D. Anthony identifies four that enable successful innovation. They are:

1. Be externally focused.


2. Recognize that your first idea is wrong.


3. Release your inner Edison, and start sweating.


4. Break the sucking sound of the core.

Entrepreneurs are perpetually optimistic about their new ideas. Scott D. Anthony offers five questions to ask any entrepreneur with an idea:

1. Is there an important problem that customers can't address because existing solutions are expensive or inconvenient?


2. Is there a disruptive way to solve the problem in a simpler, more convenient, or more affordable way?


3. Is there a plausible hypothesis about an economically attractive, scalable business model?


4. Does the team have the right stuff to course-correct according to in-market learning?


5. Can early profitability be a choice?

In answer to the question some may have asked when reading the title of this article, Scott D. Anthony has borrowed from the U.S. Declaration of Independence for his proposed Innovator's Pledge. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all have the ability to innovate, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Capabilities, that among these are Curiosity, Creativity, and the pursuit of Growth." (Page 247, The Little Black Book of Innovation)

Scott D. Anthony's Bio:
Based in the firm's Singapore offices, Scott D. Anthony is Managing Director, Innosight Asia-Pacific. He leads Innosight's Asian operations and venture-capital investing activities (Innosight Ventures). He chairs the investment committee for IDEAS Ventures, a SGD 10 million fund Innosight runs in conjunction with the Singapore government. The fund's portfolio currently consists of four Singaporean companies: Versonic, The Mobile Gamer, WildFire, and iTwin. Innosight intends to make another 10+ seed investments in the coming years.

Scott D. Anthony's passion is in enabling innovators around the world to realize their untapped potential. In early 2010 he and his family relocated from the United States to Singapore to take advantage of the booming opportunities for innovation in Asia. He has spent significant time on the ground in India, Singapore, Korea, and the Philippines, and believes these and other countries are poised to be true innovation powerhouses.

He has served as an active Board member for two companies incubated by Innosight (Village Laundry Service, a laundry service company based in Bangalore, and Guaranteach, a US-based online education company), helping those companies develop and execute their strategy and raise external expansion capital.

Scott D. Anthony received a BA in economics summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar. Previously he worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Co., a strategic planner for Aspen Technology, and a product manager for WorldSpace Corporation. While at McKinsey, he co-authored a publicly released report on the United Kingdom's economic prospects. Prior to joining Innosight, he was a senior researcher with Clayton Christensen, managing a group that worked to further Christensen's research on innovation.

He is a sought-after strategic advisor who has worked closely with senior leaders in companies such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, General Electric, LG, Credit Suisse, and Cisco Systems on topics of growth and innovation. He joined the Board of Directors of Media General in 2009.

Scott D. Anthony is a featured speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has run more than 100 training workshops, and in 2008-2009 served on the faculty of the Leadership, Innovation and Growth program at General Electric Crotonville. He has appeared on Good Morning America, CNBC, and FOX Business.

Scott D. Anthony has written extensively about innovation. He is the author of The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It (Harvard Business Review Press 2012). He is the co-author of the Harvard Business Review article "How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate." He co-authored Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change (2004) with Harvard Business School Professor and Innosight founder Clayton Christensen, was the lead author of The Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work (2008) and author of The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times (2009). He has written articles for publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Business Week, Forbes, Sloan Management Review, Advertising Age, Marketing Management, and Chief Executive, and serves as a judge in The Wall Street Journal's Innovation Awards. He has a regular column at Harvard Business Online.