Rita Mehta: Take advantage of organizational processes to build into your company's ways of operating like a traditional business. She says you want to create structures which protect and support the smaller, more experimental efforts from the kind of juggernaut of the ongoing business. My rule of thumb is growth or new business development will be item number one, number two or number three if you really mean it, she says.
To plan for the future, businesses usually look to their past. But what if your company is in uncharted territory? Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath has a different idea: Design experiments to test your assumptions using “discovery-driven growth.”