‘SME’s are reluctant to invest in innovation. The rewards, read profits, are not clear enough for the immediate focus that most SME’s operate in.’ I was discussing with an expert on innovation and instinctively knew he was right. I’ve had difficult experiences discussing innovation with SME’s. There is interest and curiosity about innovation because most feel innovation could lead them to the next level. But the perceived risks and costs still outweigh the decision to move forward.

Planning innovation can be a tricky thing. It’s so unlike planning projects for a proven business and inherently paradoxical: you try to plan the unknown. On top of that we haven’t learn to plan that way. Our education system teaches us to plan for known things, you add a 10% contingency for the unknown and you’re ready to go.

Planning for learning

But planning for innovation is not planning for implementation. It’s planning for learning.

When planning for learning there are three important things to take into account. I’ll use Tetris (being viewed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest game ever) as an example to show what I mean.

• 1. Invest time in getting your assumptions right. If you know what you assume then you know what to learn. It makes it possible to formulate a hypothesis that you can test.

Let’s assume you want to organise Tetris in the most efficient way because it achieves the goal of lasting as long as possible in the game. Your learning hypothesis could be: knowing the shapes of the blocks and the different ways they can fall into one and other.

• 2. Design a strong and short feedback loop. The learning goes faster when you get quick feedback from the test.

Tetris has a very quick feedback loop, often immediate. Just monitor your emotional reaction when receiving the new building block. Sometimes you rejoice or sigh with relief because you can put the block on a neat place, often you fulminate of the impossibility to put the block in a nice spot.

• 3. Allow for failure. It’s from failure you learn the most. So build in failure in your plan and ask yourself the right questions to learn effectively.

With Tetris you always fail. You cannot win the game, at least… I didn’t and I don’t know anyone that did. But the more you try the more you learn about an efficient organisation of the blocks.

in failure lies the success

And as the great basket-ball player Michael Jordan put it: in failure lies the success.

‘I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’