Gambling on Innovation: How To Be Productively Wrong With Luis Perez-Breva Of MIT

Published: April 27, 2020, 8 a.m.

In this episode, we are joined by Luis Perez-Breva, a lecturer and research scientist at MIT\u2019s School of Engineering and the Director of MIT\u2019s Innovation Teams Program. Luis has extensive experience in both innovation practice - via his involvement in multiple startups - and innovation research - through his academic work. \xa0

We are talking about his first book, Innovating: A Doer\u2019s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong.

What Was Covered

  • Why Luis sees following \u201cinnovation recipes\u201d is inherently wasteful and essentially high stakes gambling
  • How the best innovators both prepare for scale at each stage and excel at applying their \u201cparts\u201d to identified problems
  • How a corporation\u2019s existing products and services give it an innovation advantage over startups

Key Takeaways and Learnings

  • Luis\u2019s tried and tested method, anticipating failure at each \u2018scale\u2019, which can help innovators to prepare and solve as many foreseeable faults as possible - what he calls being \u201cproductively wrong\u201d as a way to avoid \u201cfailing predictively\u201d
  • How to use linear processes to improve the non-linear process of building innovation
  • Innovating the skillset; how companies learn and repurpose what they do today to provide entirely different products in the future

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Podcast