The Illusion of Innovation

Summary

There's a problem with innovation inside of big companies. And it's not what you think. Corporations are better managed than ever, but they're less capable of delivering the breakthroughs that change our world for the better. Big companies are too often focused on efficiency instead of resiliency. They're optimized for safety and predictability, for maintenance of the status quo. Their focus on capital efficiency leads them to engage in an illusion of innovation: activity that feels like innovation but leads to value destruction, not progress.
This book explains why meaningful innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency and how large corporations can harness the power of small teams—startups—to drive radical change through systematic experimentation.
The Illusion of Innovation explores:
• What the Federal Witness Protection Program reveals about the power of individuals
• How the Amazon river basin relies on random evolution to build resiliency
• How the NBA's shift to the three-point rule demonstrates the importance of thoughtful experiments
• How one-thousand-year-old businesses survive crises
We need scaled corporations to recover their problem-solving capacity. This means questioning decades of embedded assumptions about why corporations exist and finding ways to run faster, cheaper, and weirder experiments. It's time to build again.