Jacob Dutton says corporate innovators waste energy fighting for budget because they lack a clear annual plan. He argues for a concrete sheet showing how many territories, opportunities, and ideas you'll pursue and scale each year. This one document drives budgeting, hiring, team structure, and stakeholder expectations.
Chapters
The next thing that I want to touch on is, I think, an issue that most corporate innovators are up against is that they find themselves fighting for budget, right? Every time they want to explore a new territory or test a new idea or, um, you know, get a well-validated idea to market, they're really fighting for that budget, and that is not fine. Okay, we'll come on to finance shortly, but first I want to talk about planning. You wouldn't believe how few corporate innovators can show me a sheet of paper with their annual plan on it, just telling me how many territories, how many opportunities, how many ideas they're going to focus on this year, and how many initiatives ultimately they want to scale. This is an actual plan that we're working on with one of our clients this year. Um, pretty straightforward, you know, they only want to explore and launch kind of 4 new things, but you can see how that's standing out here and what that means for kind of team size, shape, and cadence. And you really need to get to a place where you can visualize your plan and stick to it. That's really going to help you with budgeting, recruitment, you know, even things like expectations, stakeholder management, everything. So that's component 6. You've got to agree on the number of new propositions that you want to scale every year, and subsequently how many ideas you need to validate and how many opportunities you need to identify in order to get there. Turn that into an annual plan, visualize it all.
