Michael Schrage

What is the best way for a company to innovate? That's exactly the wrong question.The better question: How can organizations get the maximum possible value from their innovationinvestments? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may bewonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. But this book addresses theinnovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. They want fast, frugal,and high impact innovations. They don't just seek superior innovation, they want superiorinnovators. In The Innovator's Hypothesis, innovation expertMichael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively--andcompetitively -- crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice.Creativity within constraints -- clear deadlines and clear deliverables -- is what seriousinnovation cultures do. Schrage introduces the 5X5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people upto five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. The book describes multiple portfolios of 5X5experiments drawn from Schrage's advisory work and innovation workshops worldwide. These includefinancial service approaches for improving customer service and addressing security challenges; apharmaceutical company's hypotheses for boosting regulatory compliance; and a diaper divisions'efforts to give babies and parents alike better "diapering experiences" withglow-in-the-dark adhesives, diagnostic capability, and bundled wipes. Schrage's5X5 is enterprise innovation gone viral: Successful 5X5s make people more effective innovators, andmore effective innovators mean more effective innovations.

How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas

The Innovator's Hypothesis

Who do you want your customers to become? According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail. In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough—serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers. Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers—thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution—will you transform your business. Schrage explains how the above question (what he calls “The Ask”) will incite you and your team to imagine and design ideal customer outcomes as the way to drive your business’s future. The Single is organized around six key insights and includes practical exercises to help you apply the question to your current situation. Schrage also includes examples from well-known companies—Google, Facebook, Disney, Starbucks, Apple, IKEA, Dyson, Ryanair, and others—to illustrate just what is possible when you apply “The Ask.” Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’—and turn your innovation efforts on their head. HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.

Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

How companies like Amazon and Netflix know what “you might also like”: the history, technology, business, and social impact of online recommendation engines. Increasingly, our technologies are giving us better, faster, smarter, and more personal advice than our own families and best friends. Amazon already knows what kind of books and household goods you like and is more than eager to recommend more; YouTube and TikTok always have another video lined up to show you; Netflix has crunched the numbers of your viewing habits to suggest whole genres that you would enjoy. In this volume in the MIT Press's Essential Knowledge series, innovation expert Michael Schrage explains the origins, technologies, business applications, and increasing societal impact of recommendation engines, the systems that allow companies worldwide to know what products, services, and experiences “you might also like.” Schrage offers a history of recommendation that reaches back to antiquity's oracles and astrologers; recounts the academic origins and commercial evolution of recommendation engines; explains how these systems work, discussing key mathematical insights, including the impact of machine learning and deep learning algorithms; and highlights user experience design challenges. He offers brief but incisive case studies of the digital music service Spotify; ByteDance, the owner of TikTok; and the online personal stylist Stitch Fix. Finally, Schrage considers the future of technological recommenders: Will they leave us disappointed and dependent—or will they help us discover the world and ourselves in novel and serendipitous ways?

Recommendation Engines

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Achieving faster, better, cheaper, and more creative innovation outcomes with the 5X5 framework: 5 people, 5 days, 5 experiments, $5,000, and 5 weeks. What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending “innovation vacations” and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator's Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively—and competitively—crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.

How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas

Successful innovation demands more than a good strategic plan; it requires creative improvisation. Much of the "serious play" that leads to breakthrough innovations is increasingly linked to experiments with models, prototypes, and simulations. As digital technology makes prototyping more cost-effective, serious play will soon lie at the heart of all innovation strategies, influencing how businesses define themselves and their markets. Author Michael Schrage is one of today's most widely recognized experts on the relationship between technology and work. In Serious Play, Schrage argues that the real value in building models comes less from the help they offer with troubleshooting and problem solving than from the insights they reveal about the organization itself. Technological models can actually change us--improving the way we communicate, collaborate, learn, and innovate. With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage shows how companies such as Disney, Microsoft, Boeing, IDEO, and DaimlerChrysler use serious play with modeling technologies to facilitate the collaborative interactions that lead to innovation. A user's guide included with the book helps readers apply many of the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation.

Michael Schrage

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