STEVE BLANK | Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, Stanford University


Is your organization full of hackathons, shark tanks, incubators, and other innovation programs, but none have changed the trajectory of your company/agency? Finding out why some innovation programs succeed, and others fail is not easy, and it took many years for Pete Newell, CEO at BMNT Inc., and I to identify the answer to this question. We now believe that we have a better understanding of how to build innovation programs that will deliver products and services, not just demos. 


In this article, we explain why an understanding of ‘Innovation Stack’ – the hierarchy of innovation efforts that have emerged in large organizations and consist of ‘individual innovation’, ‘innovation tools and activities’, ‘team-based innovation’ and ‘operational innovation’ – could help organizations build successful innovation programs.