Keynotes

The Era the Apex Innovators


We have entered a new era in business. An era in which a few giant and incredibly successful companies have mastered the skills to continue to grow and innovate with the agility of startups. I call these outliers Apex Innovators.


Apex Innovators don’t use their giant size as an excuse for slowing down. They leverage it and combine it with pretotyping to accelerate, explore, and win with new products—and in new markets.


The reward for Apex Innovators? Double-digit growth! Year after year. With no end in sight. This is not supposed to happen, that rate of growth is reserved for small companies not multi-billion industry giants. But it is happening. And it’s a tornado on the competitive landscape.


Apex Innovators have upped the ante, rewritten the rules, and set new standards. Companies once considered innovation leaders can, at best, be called “moderately innovative” when compared to today’s Apex Innovators. And “moderately innovative” does not cut it these days.


The Era of Apex Innovators seminars and workshops, the same one Alberto offers at Google and Stanford, are designed specifically for already large and well-established companies and market leaders that are ready to use their size and resources to their advantage and join the ranks of the Apex Innovators.

The Right It Strategy


It's not enough to have innovative ideas and to execute them competently, those ideas must succeed in the market. Unfortunately, most innovations fail in the market. They fail because they are The Wrong It—ideas the market does not care about, regardless of how well they are designed, built, and marketed. By contrast, The Right It is an idea for a new product which, if competently executed, will succeed in the market.

The same is true for every aspect of your business from supply chain, to marketing, to human resources - they are internal markets in your companies waiting for innovative ideas. But are they the Right IT? Funding and scaling a large internal rollout of your new SAAS or incentive program have the same market failure rates as launching products.

More of your business is about HOW you get a product or service to market than defining the product. There is more Innovation Potential in the whole organization than just one more feature update in your core business. And you already have the resources you need to unleash a Total Innovation strategy across the company.

Help your organization make better decisions and choose the best ideas on their own idea based on data instead of opinions or whoever is the loudest in the room when it's time to decide. Data beats opinions every time.

Pretotyping


Have you ever poured your heart, blood, sweat, tears and money to build, perfect and launch an innovative "can't miss" new product or feature ... and then discovered that your "can't miss" idea turned out to be something that few customers actually wanted or needed? I call this scenario ​The Innovator's Nightmare and it's something that most aspiring Apex Innovators have to deal with because, as decades of data show, most new products and most innovations fail in the market.

Pretotyping, is a set of tools, techniques, and tactics developed and perfected at Google and now taught at Stanford and successfully practiced by hundreds of other organizations. Pretotyping helps you avoid The Innovator's Nightmare by helping you make sure that you are building The Right It before you build It right. In addition, pretotyping helps you make the most of your innovation potential, because it makes it possible for you to explore and test, quickly and cheaply, extreme ideas that would normally be dismissed as too risky or expensive to try. By combining these two benefits of pretotyping, an established and successful company can maximize its chances for successful breakthrough innovation.