How playing chess can make you a better innovator
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nThe consistently excellent Innovating to Win blog points out that chess strategy holds a number of important lessons for business innovators. Here are five key principles from chess that are also highly valuable lessons for innovation:
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- Be active, not passive. “If you don’t take control of your innovation agenda, you have no hopenof breaking the cycle of accidental innovation—not knowing when, or if,nthe next great innovation will come”;
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- Know your endgame. “For innovators this means that you need to know where are want to go if you are going to get there”;
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- Tactics are the tools to implement strategy. “As innovators, we are faced with many different problems to solve. nDifferent problems yield to different techniques. It is essential thatninnovators have a broad array of innovation best practices in theirnarsenal”;
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- Never relax before the game is done. “The innovation game is never over. You must always keep reassessingnyour strategies and reinventing your offerings. Make yourself obsoletenbefore someone else does it for you”;
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- Be flexible, conditions can change on a single move. “You must keep abreast of market and technology conditions both withinnyour space and adjacent spaces. This means you need efficient methodsnfor accessing knowledge from outside of your organization andnintegrating it into your innovation practices. Leverage thisninformation to recognize early signs of a change in the tide so you cannmake course adjustments early.”
[image: The Luzhin Defence]
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