为快速创新建立团队

It’s no surprise that effective innovation can be challenging for established organizations. The conventional wisdom—as articulated in classic tomes of business wisdom like 创新者的困境-表明强大的组织激励导致大型企业优先考虑成熟业务线的增量增长, 而不是投资于颠覆性的技术，这些技术可能会在未来几年带来回报，但在今天的P上只是一个小点&L.

Executives today are well aware of the risk of being left behind. 创新周期比以往任何时候都短, 这在一定程度上是由硅谷及其初创企业和技术人员大军推动的，他们把目标对准了太阳底下的每一个行业. 成熟企业的领导者, the implications are sobering: the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has decreased 从1935年的90岁到今天的18岁. Assuming a constant churn rate, 75% of the current members of the S&标普500指数将于2027年退市.

比以往任何时候都更加清楚的是，可持续增长——即使是短期的——是预测球在哪里并将资源分配到那里的功能. 当然，说起来容易做起来难. Investing in disruptive ideas can strain an organization’s pool of talent and capital with no guaranteed reward. Assuming that internal ventures exhibit the same 偏态分布 of success as startups, the vast majority of new initiatives will fail to make a material impact.

用敏捷团队去风险创新

企业如何去风险创新? In our view, the most important factor in enterprise innovation is assembling the right team for the job. Creating new ventures is non-routine by definition, requiring leaders who balance deep customer and business insight with the entrepreneurial horsepower to learn fast, 更快地执行任务，随时应变.

Many large organizations pursue internal innovation by harnessing the abilities of their best employees, but we believe an exclusive focus on in-house talent is a missed opportunity. In this article, we make the case that corporate innovation teams should be augmented by agile talent, 创建一支具有两个世界最佳特征的创新打击力量——足够的速度和精确的专业知识，以迅速应对破坏性的机会, while retaining a deep connection to customer needs and minimizing the risk of obstructing core projects.

To frame our discussion of why agile team members matter, 我们将介绍杰夫·贝佐斯——世界上最具创新力的ceo之一——的重要见解，这为成功的创新战略奠定了坚实的哲学基础. Then, 我们说明了如何结合敏捷人才可以使组织遵循这些最佳实践并取得成功.

To Innovate Well, Make High-Velocity Decisions

In his 2016 letter 给亚马逊的股东, Jeff Bezos makes the observation that mature enterprises make high-quality decisions but tend to make them slowly. Instead, he argues, “你必须以某种方式做出高质量的产品, high-velocity decisions…if you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be costly for sure.”

For their part, 初创公司以其“瞬间转向”的能力而闻名——当一个关键的假设被早期数据推翻时，他们会意识到这一点，并通过调整从产品到整个商业模式的一切来执行这一洞察力，以反映新的现实. On the other hand, 企业经常面临可能影响数千人和数百万美元收入的决策. 其结果是，员工们学会了将结构化流程应用于决策——这是一种保护组织免受不利影响的文化, but also encourages risk aversion and incrementality. How can executives replicate startup-scale agility in a corporate environment while preserving quality?

对于已建立的组织来说，适应高效创新所需的快速节奏的最有力方法之一是利用敏捷人才——高水平的自由职业者, consultants and independent workers who bring a fresh perspective, relevant expertise, bandwidth and freedom from the institutional norms that can and do hamper in-house talent. To explore why, we’ll walk through three tactics that Bezos believes are essential to high-velocity decisions:

1)收集足够的信息

Paul Graham, 作为孵化器Y Combinator的创始人，他支持了数十家成功的初创企业, has noted that if an innovative idea seems obvious at the time you’re making it, it may not be as innovative as you believe. On their face, the most disruptive ideas can seem bold and even ill-advised—and indeed, 他们中的大多数都会失败.

当他们思考颠覆性的想法时, large organizations tend to over-correct in the face of uncertainty, spending far too long collecting enough information to reach a high conviction threshold. But blindly throwing darts at the board isn’t the right strategy either. The key, according to Bezos, is making decisions with “somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.”

在你的创新团队中加入敏捷人才是完成这一任务和缩短延长的决策循环的最有效方法之一. As consultants and freelancers who constantly make rapid decisions in the course of their day-to-day, 敏捷团队成员不太可能被锁定在最终会减慢决策制定速度的高信念心态中.

Moreover, innovation teams can hand-pick agile team members with precise knowledge of the opportunity at hand. 大多数企业的创新团队都是如此 comprised of talented, well-connected generalists who have a deep understanding of an enterprise’s customers and core business, but may not be subject-matter experts in the company’s new areas of interest. In addition to their entrepreneurial mindset, 自由职业者可以运用深厚的专业知识，帮助创新团队比依靠员工创新者更快地达到70%的门槛.

The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has decreased 从1935年的90岁到今天的18岁.

2)做出可逆的决定

在他的经典著作中 The Lean Startup, author Eric Ries advocates for a “build-measure-learn” strategy for startups, noting that innovation is a “feedback loop” that helps founders decide when to persevere and when to pivot. 事实是，大多数颠覆性的想法都不会成功，而限制选错马的不利风险的最好方法是做出可逆转的决定. In Bezos’s words, if a decision is reversible, “so what if you’re wrong?”

Rather than investing scarce talent and capital in an unproven idea, 组织应该努力在一个允许他们测试假设和迭代的结构中进行创新, shifting direction without feeling encumbered or pot committed. 高质量的人才是实施创新战略的首要成本，也是最大的成本，这还不包括从其他项目中挖走顶尖员工的机会成本.

让一个新项目更具“可逆性”的一个明确途径是使用敏捷人才来执行构建-度量循环的前几次迭代, 测试假设和构建mvp，而无需立即分配内部团队的成本和中断. Enterprises can even assign separate agile team members to pursue competing approaches to the same problem, parallelizing the innovation process without diverting full-time resources.

3)快速提交和执行

Once a disruptive idea has been validated, it seems reasonable to staff an internal innovation team on executing it. Internal stakeholders are closest to the customer, 在大多数情况下，他们将最有能力承担创造性的过程，将新颖的见解转化为真正成功的新产品和服务.

On the other hand, by definition, innovating implies extending a competency within a business, or defining an entirely new competency in the form of a brand new offering. 现有员工可能并不总是有能力执行与现有产品线大不相同的新项目. 随着时间的推移, 他们可以为工作做好准备, 但在竞争激烈的市场中，重新分配现有员工或仅仅雇佣一个新团队可能会极其缓慢.

High-quality agile talent can fill the gap between a validated idea and a real product, 使组织能够以足够快的速度向客户交付产品，从而击败竞争对手，直到能够毫不妥协地组建高质量的内部团队. As Bezos reminds us in his shareholder letter, “速度在商业中至关重要”——在一个赢者通吃的市场中，首先推出一款改变游戏规则的产品，可能会决定一家企业在未来几年的繁荣与否.

Agile Talent Can Help Any Organization Innovate Like A Startup

每一位高管都明白，走在潮流的前面，在别人可以为你做之前颠覆你的业务的重要性. 但是，在面对相当大的不确定性时，执行这一原则并将资源投入破坏性项目并不总是像看起来那么容易, especially for large enterprises that have grown accustomed to a more deliberate approach.

Ultimately, 创新企业和停滞企业的区别不在于它们的战略见解是否准确, 但他们采取行动的可能性. 通过运用敏捷人才，降低追求创新的活化能，使决策具有更大的可逆性和速度, 成熟的组织将更好地避开来自灵活进入者的竞争威胁，并以创新的方式实现长期发展, sustainable growth.