I was reading in a recent innovation article “like with most tech accelerators, the emphasis is more on building things than planning things” and this sparked in me a conundrum that I’d be curious to read your ideas about.

What should be the ratio in a truly innovative company between building many MVPs or not so minimum, viable products and planning the best way forward?

It seems instinctive to keep trying and failing fast, yet you would think that a “little” planning might go a long way in reducing the liabilities and increasing the likelihood of success.

It seems to me that how you define success might push you to act in one or the other way:
if your organization’s success is measured in the amount of sales, the amount of clients, the amount of profit then clearly a more focused, planned, path forward makes more sense.

What if you define success as the amount of learning?
In that case clearly the balance shifts towards more new frontier-pushing trial and error.

That is why I feel that a missing connection could be the solution: the connection between academia and enterprises. People in academia have a different time sensitivity and are very complementary with the speed of innovation in enterprises (big and small).
So finding your source of learning and experimenting whilst balancing with enough time for planning might be one way forward for the best innovation and learning and overall success to emerge.