Radical Innovation, The Way I See It

Radical innovation is not a slogan. It is a discipline. If you want big outcomes, you have to treat them like a craft with rules, steps, and a lot of honest checks. Below is how I think about it, based on lessons from great builders and from my own work turning ideas into things that can live in the real world.

Start with a bold innovation story hypothesis

A real bold innovation starts with three ingredients that fit together like a lock and key.

1) There has to be a huge problem with the world that you can name and want to solve. Second, you have to have a radical proposed solution that we can pre-agree it would very likely solve that huge problem with the world.

2) And then three, there has to be some kind of breakthrough technology that even if it just gives us a glimmer of a hope that we could make that radical proposed solution, it is a testable hypothesis. You have a proposed way of starting.

When those three conditions exist, you have a bold innovation story hypothesis. That is not the finish line. That is permission to begin the journey.

Graduation, not attachment

One of the biggest traps in innovation labs is clinging too tightly to the first project that shows promise. When one idea takes off, there is a strong temptation to pour all resources into it. The danger is that the lab slowly becomes a single-product company instead of a pipeline for many potential breakthroughs.

The solution is graduation. As soon as a project can stand on its own, it should leave. Once it starts to scale, it belongs outside. The lab goes back to searching for the next spark.

Think of it like a music studio. You write and produce new tracks. When one becomes a hit, it leaves the studio, gets promoted, and reaches the audience. The studio doesn’t just keep playing that same track over and over, it goes back to producing the next hit. That’s the mindset.

What the job really is

But our job is not just to prove the technical feasibility of something, but to try to ask and answer all of the questions, to burn down all of the major risks around whether this really could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the world. We use the phrase bold innovation to remind us to keep our visions big, to keep dreaming.

We use the word lab to remind ourselves that we want to have concrete visions, concrete plans to make them real. And here is the secret that most pitch decks hide. The bold innovation lab is a messy place. Instead of avoiding the mess or pretending it is not there, you make the mess your strength. You spend most of your time breaking things and trying to prove that you are wrong. That is it. That is the secret.

Money is not the method

How do you manage it financially. Someone will always say, if we throw more money, more time, and more people at this, we can crack it. I would hate to hear that argument. Big budgets do not create breakthroughs by themselves. They can, in fact, hide weak logic. The hard work is to remove unknowns, not to inflate inputs.

Systematize the risk, not just the hope

Our goal is not radical innovation. Our goal is to pursue radical innovation efficiently. We are trying to systematize the process.

So the question we have to ask over and over and over again is what is the reward-risk ratio for each of the ideas that we are considering. We are trying to burn down risk and discover which one or two percent of the things that we look at actually could be very large enduring businesses that turn out to be really great for the world.

This sounds simple, but it creates a daily operating rhythm:

• Name the risks explicitly. Technical risk, go-to-market risk, regulatory risk, supply chain risk, unit economics risk. Write them down. Rank them. Attack the tallest spike first.

• Design tests that can fail fast. Not demos that impress visitors, but experiments that could prove your assumption wrong by next week. If it fails, great, you just saved months.

• Measure learning, not vanity. A working prototype means little if the customer will not pay, or if the cost curve will never bend. Every week should reduce uncertainty, not just increase polish.

• Protect the portfolio. If one concept starts to win, graduate it. Make space for new shots. The lab is a pipeline, not a trophy room.

What success looks like

If you run this system well, most ideas will die early, a few will reach convincing proof, and maybe one or two percent will show the kind of reward-risk ratio that justifies graduation. Those are the seedlings of very large, enduring businesses that can be great for the world. They might look obvious in hindsight, but they are only obvious because you did the messy work upfront, breaking things, proving yourself wrong, and burning down the biggest risks.

Radical innovation is not magic. It is a repeatable habit. You start with a huge problem worth solving, a radical proposed solution that could actually fix it, and a breakthrough technology that gives you a testable path. You treat the lab like a music studio. You graduate the winners. You never confuse money with method. And you keep asking the same question every day, what is the reward-risk ratio now, after what we learned this week.

Hold on to big visions, keep dreaming, and run the process with discipline. That is how bold innovation becomes reality.