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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

Today I'm talking with David Duncan, co-author of the HBO article,

Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days, and a senior partner at Innesite.

Dave, thanks much for talking with us today.

Thank you for having me.

So the article really is an attempt to kind of set out a systematic process for making innovation in a company sort of

more mindful and planful and organized.

At the same time I know a lot of the amazing stories you hear about big breakthroughs make it sound like the person just came

up with that breakthrough by accident and that's the sort of common theme in a lot of science and

R&D sort of myth-making and I'm just wondering, you know, how much is it really even possible

to set up a process for kind of controlling that kind of creativity?

Well, serendipitous ideas that turn into major innovations do happen, but they're relatively rare.

And the key thing is that you don't want the future of your company to be dependent on strokes of luck or accidental breakthroughs.

And you know if you think about the challenge that a large company like Procter and Gamble has just to maintain the growth trajectory that they're on

and to maintain the valuation that they have that has a growth expectation built into it.

They actually have to innovate at a level of billions of dollars of value,

revenue created every year,

and do that in a predictable way.

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