Just a note for myself, sorry if this doesn't really make sense at its current state!

First Principles:

• "not all smart people work for you"
• top-talents are around the globe; most are already hired or working on their own projects
• talents won't work for you forever
• companies will inevitably reach the dilemma zone at some point. to avoid the innovators dilemma (RE sunk cost fallacy + 路径依赖), we need people to bring in new ideas, often from the outside with fresh eyes.
  • we often achieve this through new hires and acquisitions of startups - what's an even lower cost and risk for employers to do this? in other words, what's the absolute smallest unit of item that will be able to bring in fresh and innovative ideas to the company

• successful and growing companies are always hiring, looking for the next best talent
  • not only that. successful companies need to constantly fire people, condense to make the core team to be as lean and efficient as possible, and do more with less
    • large and successful companies should only expand and hire to go through trial and error (because their advantage is having sufficient capital and can take larger risks) until they can find who they are looking for, and let go of the rest
• innovation is often the combination of existing items and ideas, hence, modularity
  • Deconstruct then reconstruct
    • recombination of ideas from seemingly unrelated fields (ENTPs are great)
      • i.e., develop at least 2-3 hobbies or be excited to learn 20hrs of new things every month
    • boiling things down to the first principles and then substituting a more effective solution for one of the key parts
  • AlphaGo Zero can defeat AlphaGo because it never cares about sunk cost fallacy - it always goes back to First Principles
  • the most modular thing: code; the 2nd most modular thing: Notion bricks; the 3rd most modular thing: people
    • but even modularity is a form
      • instead, optimize function, rather than form 得意忘形 (e.g., airplane vs flying car, Google modular phone)

Examples:

Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) - established by European Commission & WEF - connects corporates to startups

1. incentives

• corporates can find investment opportunities, access latest technology and build partnerships
• startups/scaleups can find capital, sales and strategy funnels

2. current open innovation process based on 2 scales (internal vs external innovation)

• internal: team has strong dedication and organization wide awareness with KPI, incentives and training, encourages high risk projects
  • open innovation unit, CIO/CDO
  • established process for OI
  • embracing failure
• external:
  • scouting process (e.g., hackathons, free working space, software/hardware resources0
  • trend-spotting, regular visits, established outposts in SV/Israel/global tech startup hubs
  • startup co-development and corporate accelerator (both in house & third party like Techstars)
  • startup procurement integrating startup solutions into corporates' existing infrastructure & a way for startups to validate their ideas + streamlining the legal/financial process for that to happen
  • startup investment & acquisition, bringing new ideas, talents, solutions and markets
• successful open innovation companies typically start as a newbie, without either internal or external strategies, then develop internal strategy, and then eventually become a super star with both internal & external open innovation strategies

Google - 20% concept

3M - 15% concept