Innovating at Scale Requires Vision and Discipline

Every new company reaches a point where the straws have been grasped and a next major step appears imminent. It’s a time when the early stages of innovating (and talking about innovating) seems to take a back seat to scaling. The company gets bigger. It doubles-down on its products. It plays with the hand its got.

But as Frank Addante explains over at Wired, a smart company knows that there’s no reason why growth can’t coincide with further innovation. We’ve talked about this subject before. You don’t want to end up like Blackberry, a company that failed to be dynamic in an industry that moves as fast as a Bitcoin transfer.

Addante, the CEO of The Rubicon Project, suggests a strong and continuous financial commitment to innovation, even if you have to trick yourself into doing it:

“A solution for this is to setup a separate “savings account” for innovation. Keep your checking and savings accounts separate. In theory, there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to manage both in one account, right? But, the reason we create separate checking and savings accounts is because it forces discipline.”

Keeping the separate savings account clean needs to be a major priority, Addante explains. It also takes a keen vision to know when and how to spend the money. The important thing is that it’s there and it’s earmarked for innovation — the thing that will keep your company alive year after year after year.

Read more of Addante’s article at Wired.

Photo credit: Chones / Shutterstock