An innovation is an idea, practice, or object perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption. By definition, nothing truly innovative can be proven in advance analytically. Innovation is unavoidably unreliable.* Innovation is also indispensable. Innovation is inherent in crafting a winning strategy.* Innovation is necessary to navigate the intensifying complexity of the external operating environment* and mitigate the resulting organizational complexity.*

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Innovation is not necessarily technological in nature. Indeed, the diffusion of innovations is fundamentally a social process. Moreover, an innovation need not be transformational to deliver profound results. We often underestimate the resource-sparing returns from reducing low-end friction and fail to appreciate the aggregate impact of marginal improvements.*

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Still, scale remains the ultimate objective of many organizational innovations (a complement to commercial innovation, which makes a product or service more attractive to customers). Scale entails increasing the ratio of outputs to inputs—frequently, human labor—while maintaining, if not increasing, the quality of outcomes (meeting customer needs, margins, brand perception, etc.). Scale requires extending the number of important operations that can be performed without thinking. The path to scale is to advance from mystery to heuristic to algorithm to code.* That path is laden with projects.

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Innovation means change. Change for the better is almost always a product of well-run projects closely aligned to strategy—happy accidents happen but are few and far between. Change management, project management, and knowledge management are therefore core to successful innovation initiatives and the profitable pursuit of scale.

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Unfortunately, we tend to be quite bad at projects. Only 0.5% of projects deliver on time, on budget, and with the expected benefits.*

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To be more concrete, projects involve a series of planned activities designed to generate a deliverable (a product, a service, an event).* These activities—which can be anything from a grand strategic initiative to a small program of change—are limited in time. They have a clear start and end; they require an investment, in the form of capital and human resources; and they are designed to create predetermined forms of value, impact, and benefits. Every project has elements that are unique. That’s key: each project contains something that has not been done before. It is easy to be wrong when you’ve never done it before. But it is also impossible to progress without taking the risk of being wrong.

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For more, we recommend starting with The Design of Business and How Big Things Get Done. The Checklist Manifesto is a wonderful complement. And there is no better context than Diffusion of Innovations.