Strategy is the map; innovation is the expensive sports car

Without Strategy Guiding Your Path, Increasing Innovation Investment Just Gets You Lost Faster

5 criteria to assess your strategy’s validity. A sound strategy guides and optimizes innovation. But if your strategy is flawed, your innovation is just a faster path to a Blockbuster-level blunder.

Blockbuster's Blunder

In 2000, a small DVD-by-mail startup called Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster passed on the opportunity. It wasn’t that Blockbuster lacked the horsepower to commercialize the model, but instead that they were driving without a map.

Blockbuster was the toll road: high tolls, speeding tickets in the form of late fees, and time-wasting congestion at the counter. Netflix was the app that routed traffic around customer pain-points, sending the content straight to your door. Blockbuster wasn’t beaten by a smarter competitor; it was beaten by a company that understood where the road was actually going.

If strategy is the map, then innovation is the expensive sports car. If you launch a new innovation campaign before properly setting your strategy, you’re just driving nowhere, fast. You’ll make wrong turns, hit roadblocks, and likely end up lost like Blockbuster did.

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