Ed Essey
Your Innovation Growth Partner
Because you deserve every advantage
For Innovation Leaders
You might feel like you’re just making it all up as you go. It’s hard to know you’re on the right path–until now.
Find Your Tribe Connect with other innovation leaders around the world going through the same things you are.
Learn tools from the trenches Find out what gets results from my experience working with thousands of teams.
Use only the best No clichés. No dogma. No bullshit. Discover concepts that actually work, selected from across the experts.
See what other innovation leaders are saying
Alex Alain
Director of Engineering, Dropbox
“In my role running innovation programs, I’ve found reaching out to others working in the same area very helpful. Nobody, though, has been more incisive than Ed. I’m excited Ed is sharing his experience and insights more widely so all can benefit.”
Niraj Singh
Lead SAP Experience Garage, SAP
“Ed was inspirational and added value to our program instantly. We applied different aspects of his work and thoughts directly and our mission is clearer than ever before: We need to provide our employees with pathways so they can evolve their ideas and we can create a sustainable innovation culture 🙂 Thanks Ed!”
Maj Ryan “Merlin” Middleton
US Air Force Research Lab
“Leading Air Force officers thru the process of creating and testing prototypes requires high-touch coaching and lessons on innovation culture. Partnering with Ed, we quickly learned that he is an expert at both, and the content on this site distills lessons from his key note talks and years of coaching ‘in the trenches’ providing an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to create positive change.”
Blog The freshest content to fuel your growth
Empathy is the Best Path for Innovations in A.I.
Data for AI is expensive, and too many models are built that never get used by the people they’re designed to help. You can solve both problems with the same approach. Before you invest in the data needed to train an accurate model, begin with one-on-one engagement with the people you serve, and collect the data in the process. Here’s a method for how to progress through that.
Data Are People First
Whenever there is an opportunity to choose an approach, choose the one that generates the most empathy.
Innovation Fundamental: Risks Dashboard and Derisking Meeting
If you're focusing to create a culture of learning in your team or program, here is a handy tool and checklist for doing just that. It begins with an assumptions dashboard and included a few questions to establish a culture of learning.
How to Empower Your People to Innovate
If you're frustrated by the lack of big ideas from your people, create pathways to advance their ideas. This empowers and motivates them.
The Cure for NIH Syndrome: Use the Friendship Formula to Win Sponsors
You have likely faced challenges landing an idea with another group, team, or company. In the context of big organizations, this comes up for every project that needs a sponsor as receiver. In almost any line of work, it’s very common to see people with an idea they “know” (i.e., strongly believe but without facts) is brilliant. And they “know” the right team to take it. So, they begin with over-pumped words, then they get frustrated that the team won’t listen. Many people I coach run into this, and if you do, too, here’s a formula that may help. First, […]
The World’s Top Innovation Models in One Chart
This week I was honored to speak at the Innov8rs community event Connect: Business Design & Venture Building. It featured a great group of folks around the world. In my talk, I built on some of the stuff that I’ve already written about here like How to Create Pathways for Innovation in Your Organization, The Challenges and Strengths of Corporation Incubation, and How to Unlock Innovation Growth with Fruit, Trees, and Soil. I also teased at a new artifact that many innovators have been excited about. It builds on the Maturity Model for Incubation. One Chart to Rule Them All […]
The Challenges and Strengths of Corporate Incubation
If you’re responsible for innovating and establishing incubation within large organizations, this article is for you. It’s essential. It’s challenging. You can do it. Here’s how. This article identifies the emotional underpinnings of common challenges, and presents somewhat counter-intuitive ways to address each of them, and then how to put it all together. Need: Organizational Ambidexterity As I cover in Ambidexterity: Zone to Create Breakthroughs and Growth, large orgs need to be ambidextrous to survive. On one hand, they must relentlessly execute on known business models and on the other hand they must find and achieve breakthrough successes in new […]
A Maturity Model for Incubation Projects
The model: Empathy > Stickiness > Spread > Impact > Scale Many innovators and innovation leaders are looking for a maturity model for innovation projects. You can find my favorite answer within one of the earliest books of the Lean Series. It provides a powerful model for understanding the maturity of a business along with the metrics and strategy it can employ for the fastest growth. This is an article of a new series on what happens in the incubation zone. A Maturity Model of Innovation Lean Analytics by Croll and Yoskovitz focuses on finding the one metric that matters […]
How the Incubation Zone Fits
This continues the series on the incubation zone. The incubation zone fits within a larger system, and it’s surrounded on all sides by other components that the innovation leader needs to create and influence. Incubation Zone The incubation zone is where the incubation happens. You establish a place for the teams to get the guidance, support, and resources that they need to be successful. Incubation Pipeline The incubation pipeline is the path to the incubation zone. Its goal is to ensure that the projects with the highest odds of success are in the incubation zone. This won’t be perfect–you’ll let […]
Creating an Incubation Pipeline
Over the last several posts, I’ve covered how organizations can encourage and support innovation, leading to specifically breakthrough innovations in horizon 3 (or loonshots) and how to zone to support them. Here’s how you can set up that pipeline. The stages are ideation, identification, application, selection, and then incubation.* Ideation – The pipeline begins with ideation, either continuous ideation or a specific event. See the How to Create Innovation Events for Impact article. In the culture set up by the Microsoft Garage where I work, that’s often a hackathon. Since your pipeline will likely yield more than you can support, […]
Get the Poster and Slides from my Lean Startup Conference 2019 Workshop
Update 10/28: The slides are up! You can get the slides here. The Lean Startup Conference 2019 is happening right now, and the people and content are amazing. I’m so honored to run a workshop here later today. The workshop is for innovation leaders. If you’re like the people attending, you’re looking for ways to create innovation inside large organizations. You may love the poster, which contains all of the frameworks from the training. Get the Poster Here’s a poster covering the whole talk that you can download. Several of my recent blog posts walk through the poster in detail. […]
Ambidexterity: Zone to Create Breakthroughs and Growth
Ideal organizations can create breakthrough new businesses and grow existing ones--that's organizational ambidexterity. Ambidextrous organizations achieve breakthrough innovations while relentlessly improving execution of the current business model. My favorite way to do this is Geoffrey Moore's Zone to Win model. Here's a primer on how to fit it into your firm.
How to Select High Potential Projects
If you have limited budget, time, and resources—and who doesn’t?—then you need to focus. This precision is especially important for innovation leaders who are solicited by countless project teams. Here’s how I choose which teams/projects to sponsor. This post is part of a series on creating innovation programs. So far, I’ve shared: How to Create Innovation Events for Impact (Part 1) How to Create Pathways for Innovation in Your Org (Part 2) This post addresses the next step: project selection. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the previous posts yet, because I wrote this article to stand on its own. […]
How to Create Pathways for Innovation in Your Organization
If anyone, anywhere in your organization, has a brilliant idea, how easily can you find it, recognize it, and make it real? For most organizations, it’s not very easy. The typical employee can get blocked on the early step of getting a meeting with somebody who can help. Often, there’s no established way to bring up new ideas–instead, it is ad hoc and left up to luck and hustle. If that’s your situation, you need a plan to change that. My post How to Maximize Impact from Your Hackathon stresses the importance of establishing pathways. Your project teams need pathways […]
How to Maximize Impact from Your Hackathon
At Microsoft, we just had our 6th annual Hackathon, the largest private hackathon in the world. It topped last year’s Hackathon by a nice margin. Since hackathons are in the air, here’s the first piece of a series addressing a major concern, ensuring that you get the results you’re looking for. If you want to get the most from a hackathon, this post is for you. Since I’ve been on the organizing side of many, great and small, here’s my perspective on setting up your event for impact. However, if you’re looking for advice on planning logistics, you won’t find […]
Meet the Design Context Ladder
Several years ago, UX masters Vikram Bapat, George Engelbeck, and I developed this very useful model for progressing through product design. Meet the design context ladder. Here’s the story of how it came about plus some great ways to use it. It’s simplicity belies its power. Climb the design context ladder from Concept > Scenario > Experience > User Model > Interaction Model > Interface > Fit N Finish. The Backstory Vikram and George worked on the Microsoft Developer UX team, and I was a PM bringing them in work with the Parallel Computer Platform engineers. It sometimes takes a while to […]
Climbing Your Business to the Peak
In my last post, I shared a model of how a math concept — inverted u-shaped curves — can help us think of a framework for visionary design. Among the readers, there has been a lot of excitement about this idea and how it can help designers and product strategists better think about that work. In this same spirit, I’ll share how an optimization algorithm is like lean startup methods, and how understanding this connection can lead to an even leaner startup approach. Enter hill-climbing + simulated annealing. Hill-climbing is a simple algorithm for finding a local maximum point. Here’s a simplification of hill-climbing. […]
How I Became an Undercover Learning Agent