Highest Ranking Innovation Articles from November

10 Beliefs That Get in the Way of Organizational Change – Move Fast & Fix Things 

• “Frei and Morriss argue that most big organizational problems deserve a more urgent response — a metabolic rate that honors the frustration, mediocrity, and pain of the status quo. To get there you need to strip out distractions, update your assumptions, and launch yourself over whatever administrative hurdles are in the way of making progress.”

Breaking Down an Early Stage Startup Pitch Deck – Focused Chaos

• “There’s no perfect structure for a pitch deck. This is particularly true for early stage startups (including pre-seed and seed) because they have less “meat on the bones”—the product might not exist, there may be no traction, etc. At the early stages there are many more assumptions to validate than things you’ve proven, so pitch decks take on a higher-level, “imagine a world where…” storytelling approach.”

Leaders, Make Curiosity the Core of Your Organizational Culture – HBR 

• “To unlock the potential of their institutions and the people within them, great leaders need to demonstrate consistent curiosity in four key areas. First, they must be curious about the values and motivations of their employees in shaping and maintaining a corporate culture. Second, curiosity must be extended to customers to find out not just about your products and services but about “why” your customers love your organization. Third, leaders must reflect with open-mindedness and curiosity on their own roles, especially as they change. Finally, leaders must stay curious about the changing nature of their companies and contexts over time, and adjust their cultures accordingly.”

Continuous Improvement vs. Incremental Innovation: Are They the Same? – Robyn Bolton 

• “Both continuous improvement and incremental innovation create value. The former does it by improving what exists. The latter does it by changing (making different) what exists.”

4 Phrases That Build a Culture of Curiosity – HBR 

• “Curiosity is an exceptionally effective tool that leaders have to lead diverse teams in an increasingly complex time filled with technological advancements and an ever-changing cultural pulse. But they need to do so intentionally. Four key phrases can help in this pursuit: “I don’t know,” “Tell me more,” “I understand that you’re more than your job,” and “Who else?”

Four More Articles

Prototype Validation Techniques – Carl Vellotti 

• “Prototypes are the most powerful way to validate product ideas. Here’s a complete breakdown of 10 ways to validate your prototypes + save yourself from wasting weeks of time.”

Try This Simple 5-step Approach When You Want to Learn New Things Fast – Fast Company 

• “The Spiral Method consists of 15-20 meetings with actual human beings and refers to the steadily deepening info you get as you go. Importantly, it doesn’t mean abandoning Google. Once you gain the key learning coordinates, use Google as a supplemental tool, refining information that you gather from meetings.”

This AI Will Tell You if Your Pitch Deck is Good Enough – Haja Jan Kamps 20(13.9%)

• • “Trained on thousands of pitch decks, this specialized tool will tell you what’s working — and what isn’t — about your startup pitch deck.”

80% of Psychological Safety Has Nothing to Do With Psychology – Robyn Bolton & Alla Weinberg 

• “Why should I, or any business leader, care about psychological safety? The short answer is that without psychological safety, you are dumber. When you feel unsafe, your operating IQ, which you use for daily tasks, drops in half. Think about all the people you work with or all the people in your company. They’re there because they’re smart, have experience, and demonstrated that they can do the job. But then something goes wrong, and you wonder why they didn’t anticipate it or plan appropriately to avoid it. You start to question their competence when, in fact, it may be that they feel unsafe, so parts of their brain have gone offline. Their operating IQ isn’t operating at 100%.”

Five More Articles

Gen-Z’s Mindset Will Reshape Startup Communities – Chris Heivly 

• “The startup world adapts and evolves. Enter Generation Z  – the first true digital natives. Their entry into the startup community isn’t just a gentle nudge; it’s starting to become a wave, bringing with it a mobile-first mentality, a need for motivation, a preference for remote work, and an aversion to structured environments
  13(5.3%).”

Leaving Twitter – Benedict Evans 

• “If you see a man claim that he’ll have ‘full self-driving’ working ‘next year’ for half a decade and can’t make fun of that just a little, you are probably blinding yourself too, but it does’t matter much. And maybe you don’t care much about this, or have decided not to see it. But I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future, because I think it does matter.”

• “Finding product-market fit requires building both a product people genuinely love and value as well as a scalable growth engine to reach new customers. Focus on these two engines, achieve strong metrics in both, and you’ll be well on your way to product-market fit and startup success.”

Your Innovation Won’t Succeed Without Authentic Demand – Entrepreneur 

• “We all know it isn’t just enough to invent a new product, service, or solution. The vast majority of people are indifferent to most of the new things they’re offered. True innovators don’t just invent – as their deepest gladness is to make and do things that make a difference. Innovators recognize the innovation isn’t complete if the hoped for beneficiaries are indifferent and the innovation doesn’t sell.”

The Cost of Shadow Design Teams – Audrey Crane 

• “Companies are spending millions of dollars on shadow design teams (aka non-designers doing design work). Is yours one of them? It’s time to look at how you’re already spending money on design and spend it better.”

Five More Articles

The Power of “What Did You Learn Today?” – Any Allen

• “Asking “What did we learn today” encourages my family to think deeply about questions we want to answer and allows us to connect with each other in vulnerable, meaningful ways, but it’s only the first step to producing innovative results. Connection is the wellspring of innovation, and in order to deepen connection, we need to dosomething with what we’ve just learned.”

Almost an Agent: What GPTs can do – One Useful Thing 

• “Right now, GPTs are the easiest way of sharing structured prompts, which are programs, written in plain English (or another language), that can get the AI to do useful things. GPTs show a near future where AIs can really start to act as agents, since these GPTs have the ability to connect to other products and services, from your email to a shopping website, making it possible for AIs to do a wide range of tasks. So GPTs are a precursor of the next wave of AI.”

We Need To Take A More Evidence-Based Approach For Transformation And Change – Greg Satell 

• “The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization, you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.”

How to Use ChatGPT to Supercharge Your Sales – The Prompt Warrior 

• “Many people find themselves struggling in the sales department, not because they lack the potential, but because they haven’t put in the reps to get good at it. That’s where AI can come in. Today I’ll show you how to use ChatGPT to practice and improve your sales skills.”

What If I’m Building the Wrong Product? – Startups.com 

• “It’s best to think of our initial product as just raw clay ready to be molded. When we frame the product in that manner, it helps us get away from the notion that we should have a final product out of the gates… Our initial “raw clay” is just the most basic concept of our product (in the startup world, it is called the “Minimum Viable Product” or MVP). We should launch our MVP early as a mechanism to find out what the product should be with user feedback and testing. The more we try to guess ahead of time, the more likely we will be spending valuable time and money running down the wrong path.”

Are you an Innovation Leader?  Sign up Today

Check out our Innovation Article Databases  for over 1900+ curated innovation articles from 2020-23.

Inside Outside Innovation’s free weekly newsletter helps leaders in innovation understand the collision of tech, markets, mindsets, and networks.   SIGN UP

For more innovations resources, check out IO’s new Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, Innovation Podcast Database, and Innovation Video Database.