Hugh Molotsi

This post was first published on LinkedIn . In an earlier article, we made the case that Experimentation Gives You Innovation Superpowers and that companies with a culture of experimentation empower employees to innovate. Our example was Google who has maintained their search engine dominance by continuously raising the bar on search. Google has built infrastructure and tools to make it easy to run experiments that keep making their search engine better. Now your reaction might be - “But that’s Google! They have tons of money so of course they can afford a culture of experimentation and all the technology investments required to sustain it.” Well, your company may not be as big as Google but you probably can’t afford to not have a culture of experimentation. Making product decisions that rely on gut and opinions is not a recipe for long-term success. The good news is that any company without much more than a curious mindset can start experimenting today. In Eric Ries’ The Lea...

The following post was first published on LinkedIn . In a typical big company, the employees pushing the envelope on innovation could have an adversarial relationship with the legal department. Some innovators will even try to fly under the radar fearing the lawyers will put a kibosh on their project as soon as they get wind of it. When they ultimately have to get legal sign off, they anticipate a contentious meeting which will likely result in long delays making them wish they were working in a startup. So, it might come as a surprise that at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference , Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith , General Counsel Laura Fennell , and myself (at the time VP of Innovation) were on stage talking about how we collaborated on innovation. How was it possible that the people you expected to be frenemies would be BFFs (best friends forever)? It starts with Intuit’s approach to innovation. Instead of consigning the job of innovating to a few geniuses, at Intuit innovation is ever...