Scaling innovation

Innovation fails — sometimes spectacularly so. It’s hard enough when that failure comes early on during the start-up phase — that brilliant idea which somehow isn’t quite as brilliant when it collides with the first few encounters with the market. And when no amount of pivoting is going to save it. It’s hard but it’s a matter of squeezing it for useful lessons for the future and then throwing it in the bin. Chalk it up to experience and try again.

But what happens when you’ve gone much further down the road? When you’ve put in the hard yards, prototyping, pivoting and finally launching? And when your early efforts seem to have yielded success? When it does seem as if people value whatever it is that you’ve created from your idea?

You could just relax, take the (small) bouquets which come from succeeding at something, those plaudits from family and friends. But most likely you’ll recognise that, nice staging post though it is, you’re really only halfway along the journey. Because for your idea to have real impact you are going to need to scale it. And that’s where a whole new set of challenges come into the frame.

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