I gave a short overview of innovation in large companies at the Lean UX New York conference this morning. As I do more of these, I’m starting to realize that the following facts build on one another:

• Technology is reducing the economic order quantity of things, making the first unit produced cost as little as the millionth, because services and on-demand tools (like clouds, social media, and digital channels) mean there isn’t a big chunk of up-front investment.
• As a result, the cost of experimentation (and being wrong carefully) drops precipitously.
• At the same time, the chance that something beyond your control means you’ll fail has risen, because we face a shortage of attention and a flat-earth competitive environment.
• This means the organization’s ability to learn (cycle time) is more important than the barriers to entry into the current market (scale).

Slides below.

Tilting at Windmills: Intrapreneurship in large organizations from Lean UX NYC 2014 from Tiltmill