Gambling on Innovation: How To Be Productively Wrong With Luis Perez-Breva Of MIT

In this episode, we are joined by Luis Perez-Breva, a lecturer and research scientist at MIT’s School of Engineering and the Director of MIT’s Innovation Teams Program. Luis has extensive experience in both innovation practice - via his involvement in multiple startups - and innovation research - through his academic work.  

We are talking about his first book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong.

What Was Covered

Why Luis sees following “innovation recipes” is inherently wasteful and essentially high stakes gambling How the best innovators both prepare for scale at each stage and excel at applying their “parts” to identified problems How a corporation’s existing products and services give it an innovation advantage over startups

Key Takeaways and Learnings

Luis’s tried and tested method, anticipating failure at each ‘scale’, which can help innovators to prepare and solve as many foreseeable faults as possible - what he calls being “productively wrong” as a way to avoid “failing predictively” How to use linear processes to improve the non-linear process of building innovation Innovating the skillset; how companies learn and repurpose what they do today to provide entirely different products in the future

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Podcast

Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong – a book by Luis Perez-Breva Get in touch with Luis Perez-Breva via LinkedIn, Twitter and email - [email protected] MIT School of Engineering website The Morning Ledger: Why you probably work a giant US company, a report by Rhea Rao, The Wall Street Journal Blog, April 2017 Dual Transformation and Why Noah’s Arc Management Can’t Work with Scott Anthony of Innosight