One of the things that we discovered after several years of running innovation programmes was that we weren’t good at picking winners. Neither were our clients. Neither were the teams.
Nobody had enough information at the start of the process and no one had done it enough to have the experience to do it really well.
We had lots of data. We scored teams coming into the programmes. We scored them as they went through, we scored them at the end. If our initial judgement was right about teams then the ones coming out of the programmes should be the ones that scored highest initially.
There were a number of reasons for this. The biggest set was that a good startup is not the same as a good corporate venture.
A successful startup has to find a problem that is painful enough that people will pay enough to make the startup profitable.
A successful corporate venture has to persuade senior managers (lots of them) that their career prospects are not at risk and then do everything that a successful startup has to do.
Then you have issues with corporate strategy, how business units operate and the separation of authority and budget…
We stopped trying to choose winners up front. The failure rate was too high. Instead we focused on evidence.
How do we design programmes where ventures can gather evidence quickly and cheaply about their future prospects? The ones supported by opinion die quickly. The ones supported by evidence survive.
Simple and effective. It also helps to avoid a lot of politics.
Don’t pick winners, build systems that generate them.