Embrace fast following
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,Metro, local and regional news enterprises must set aside budgets for fundamental innovation. Still, such budgets will be too limited to conceive and test the entire range and number of fundamental innovations likely required for success in the dynamic and changing landscape of news, information, technology and more that so convulse the industry.
As a consequence, your news enterprise must embrace what is called fast following: monitoring innovations that emerge with an eye on quickly ‘following’ – quickly using innovation disciplines to test whether and how what works elsewhere will or might work in your market. It is critical to use criteria for selecting innovations to follow/test – and to use the core disciplines of cataloguing and monitoring assumptions versus knowledge, failing fast and cheap for key assumptions, and using phases and gates to manage innovations that will take time to get right.