A couple of months ago, I made the following observation about the game of professional basketball:
While crunching the numbers on 3-pointers, I noticed something kind of funny about Kobe [Bryant]: he's the highest producing scorer in the NBA, but his shooting accuracy doesn't stand out - he's pretty average, in fact. (Granted, the average NBA player can shoot the ball very well, but in a competitive world, it's relative, not absolute, performance that matters.) So, how can an average shooter be the league's leading scorer? Simple: he takes more shots per minute than his peers. Kobe scores a lot of points because he's willing to miss shots at a higher rate than his competitors.
It turns out that my analogy to business and product innovation wasn't a stretch. According to PRTM, a global consulting firm that helps large companies innovative faster and more effectively:
The [PRTM Global Product Innovation Benchmark] study...revealed a remarkable finding about development productivity–that is, delivering more products for the same R&D investment or less. Companies that experience the greatest revenue growth launch up to 45 percent more products for the same development budget as compared with low-growth companies. Source: Cashing In on Innovation: Lessons on managing product development for greater profitability and growth (registration required)
In other words, the highest scoring companies take more shots on goal per development dollar. Furthermore, they take faster shots:
PRTM found that the fastest companies could launch a new product in 40 weeks and pay back research and development outlay in 25. Source: CNBC European Business: The Innovation Issue
Let's be clear: these high performing companies aren't throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. Their foundational skills in product development, supply chain management, and marketing are competitive. However, the league-leading scorers–like Kobe–are willing to take more shots faster than their competitors. They are able to embrace the counter-intuitive notion that exposing oneself to a higher incidence of failure can lead to a higher rate of relative performance.
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