Innovation accounting

- The goal of this unit is to define, measure and understand are we making progress in our desired direction? Famously, Edward W. Deming said, "It's not enough to do your best. You must know what to do, then do your best." This becomes really important when we're talking about new product or business model innovation. New product development is a highly uncertain, complex, and often incoherent job. You never really know what you think is going to happen actually will. And this is why it's so important that we develop a systemic, systematic approach to managing innovation. The best way we know to deal with dealing with complexity is the scientific method. And this has been the crux for many movements, such as plan, do, check, act cycles, initially evangelized by Deming, but right through to the lean startup movement we've seen today with Eric Ries and build-measure-learning. So when thinking about exploring versus…