- I'm particularly interested in the challenge that a lot of companies are facing which is how do we get value from all of these efforts of innovation that we're investing in? It's become easier than ever before to start an innovation effort. Companies still struggle to get value from those efforts. A lot of companies are focused on achieving milestones, activity milestones, so the number of teams that are working in Agile, or increasing the number of hackathons that they sponsor, or increasing the number of start-ups. And they're so proud when they double or triple those activities. And I always ask them, "So what? "How do you know when to stop? "How do you know when to stop investing in those activities? "What's the value that you're trying to achieve "with all of these investments?" And they struggle with that. As a result, they end up in two pitfalls. I like food metaphores, and so the first pitfall is they tend to accumulate fondue sets. Essentially, these are innovations that are nice to have but add little if any value, at the end of the day. I love fondue, that's why I got a fondue set when I got married. I never use it. So how can we avoid accumulating fondue sets? The second pitfall that I see companies fall into is what I call bingeing. And that's essentially when we invest too much in one type of innovation and not enough on others. This is like what happens when I eat too much fondue and I don't end up with a balanced diet, I don't eat the salad I should be eating, and all the vegetables. That doesn't work in the long-term. And so, how to avoid the bingeing... In innovation, that plays out when companies, for example, focus too much on the customer experience and they think that the way to achieve a great customer experience is simply investing in customer-facing, revenue-generating innovations and they lose sight of the operational innovations, and end up increasing their customer experience but also increasing the cost to serve. So they learn the hard way that to achieve those kinds of objectives they need to take a balanced approach. I find that the way companies are avoiding these two pitfalls, the accumulation of fondue sets and the bingeing, are in two ways. They're very purposeful about their investments in innovation. So they are taking a balanced approach in how they allocate their investments across four areas of innovation. The other is in their practices. They take a test-and-learn approach to innovation and by being more purposeful about their investments and by changing their practices to a test-and-learn approach, they avoid those two pitfalls. So, going forward, I continue to look at those two aspects of what distinguishes top performing firms in terms of their investments and in terms of their practices in digital innovation.