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STRUCTURE

Shaping the Innovation Funnel

A pharmaceutical company considers, on average, about ten thousand newly discovered chemical compounds for every drug it introduces. A movie studio will consider two hundred to five hundred script summaries for every film it produces. These daunting ratios are illustrated in figure 9-1.

We have noted already that organizations use tournaments to winnow many opportunities down to the exceptional few that can become profitable innovations. The basic tournament structure used in virtually all organizations is a sequence of development tasks punctuated by filters that separate winners and losers. This structure ...

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