Teaching Innovators Better

In her innovation presentation, Diana Kander explains why the way we teach people to start new companies and launch new products is wrong. She believes more businesses fail because we're teaching the wrong thing, specifically when it comes to time allocation. The current methodology is once you have an idea, write a comprehensive business plan, then raise investment and build the product before customers come.

The speaker compares this process to the marshmallow challenge and deduces the longer you work on your plan in a vacuum, the more likely you are to fail. The innovation presentation suggests instead of teaching people to spend time writing a plan, teach them to spend time experimenting and testing their core beliefs about customer behaviour. Kander states a plan is just a starting place and that in the real world adjustments will happen.

The innovation presentation says to reverse these macro-trends, we need to stop teaching innovators they have to be fortune tellers and start teaching them to be detectives who use facts to back up behaviour.