Innovation

In the game of Battleship, knowing where your opponent’s ships are not is as important as knowing where they are.  The same is true with product development: knowing where not to invest gives you focus and dramatically increases your odds of winning the game.

All too often organizations become fragmented when one or two teams strike out on their own in pursuit of what they feel is an untapped opportunity. While the fragmentation pulls resources and capital away from more valuable pursuits, diminishing the organizations ability to deliver customer value, their ambition and passion to deliver innovation is not the problem, the problem comes when the company leadership doesn’t redirect their efforts to something more valuable.

Leaders seeking to avoid a difficult conversation, hide behind noble tact telling others we owe it to the team to support their hard work and commitment. That we need to let them keep going until they wind it down. But without having the difficult conversation, without setting some boundaries, will they? I am guessing these leaders sucked at playing Battleship.

While in some cases its important to offset the stress of executing with the joy of inventing. All to often, while well-intended, innovations are based solely on the belief they will find success rather than on first identifying a viable opportunity.

Often times, having fallen in love with the idea, these innovation teams and leadership get trapped by the sunk-cost fallacy or in the believe that if they try a little harder, work a little longer, they will find success just over the next hill. In other cases it can take the form of codependency or savior complex; Believing their efforts will save the company, they ignore the warning signs, including the abandoned efforts of others both inside and outside their company, and blindly pursue their dream. Irregardless, in all these cases without a solid foundation based in data and market analysis they are simply burning through resources better spent on other initiatives, and they themselves will eventually burn out as well.

Knowing where the battleships are not is also true for companies pursuing strong lines of growth and market position. Knowing what the market is ready for, who’s investing defining the space, creating awareness, and priming the pump is critical. While first mover advantage is the dream of many entrepreneurs, second mover advantage trades initial capital outlay for executional capabilities. Being able to outperform your competition has benefits that far outweigh the short lived gain of being first to market. Not the least of which is conserving capital to invest in go-to-market or acquisitions.

While you are racing to recoup your investment in building awareness and convincing the market the time is now, your competitors are focusing their capital on building a better instance of your product, and more importantly acquiring the talent, skills, and infrastructure required for high performance execution. Investments who’s return solely benefit themselves rather the investing in outbound messaging that benefits your competitors as much as yourself.

So before you spend time inventing, first spend time understanding the opportunity, the customer needs, and the gaps afforded by your competition. Most importantly it allows you to invest in building a better moat: superior execution.