Building an Innovation Culture: Risk, Fear & the Role of Failure Q&A

Matt Hunt is CEO of Stanford & Griggs, a strategy & innovation consulting firm located in Minnesota. Matt has over 20 years of business and technology experience with large companies, small companies and non-profit organizations.

  Governance   Lessons Learned   Manufacturing  

Our webinar Building an Innovation Culture: Risk, Fear & the Role of Failure was so successful, presenter Matt Hunt ran out of time to answer all of the questions. Here, he continues the conversation.

1. Does market capitalization of a company play any role on how tolerant the company would be toward failure?
I have not seen market capitalization specifically, but I have seen variations with cash flow and cash reserves. Much like the individual, when you’re not worried about how you’re going to put food on the table today, you can take a little more risk. Grocery stores are a good example of this--experts suggest that grocery stores run on 3% gross margins and 1% net margins. Those are pretty thin margins. In the grocery retailers that I visit, I don’t see a lot of innovation work. Most seem comfortable pushing the innovation work upstream to the product manufacturers or distributors.

2. How would one acquire the list of organizations that are risk tolerant, beyond the few companies shown?
Unfortunately, I don’t know that such a list exists. I would look to companies like LRN that have a broad survey of “high trust environments.” Those are likely the organizations that accept some level of risk and encourage innovation.

3. Postmortem reminds me of "Extreme Ownership."
I have not read Extreme Ownership, but I am sure …

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