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

OutsideVoices with Mark Bidwell

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 - [e-mail]
• 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