Pivot: How Top Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

Acknowledgments

We would first like to acknowledge our academic contributing authors, Professors Gina O'Connor and Lois Peters, for their exceptional insights and commentaries in Chapters 5, 8, 13, and 16. We also appreciate their excellent feedback for guiding us in how to make each chapter clearer, more consistent, and have the right type of impact.

This book would not have been possible without the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) team's academic research and the two foundational books: Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) and Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2008). These books provide the principles and inspiration for the Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration (D-I-A) model being put into practice through our teaching, training, coaching, and consulting activities. Dr. Mark Rice has also been a source of inspiration from the beginning, starting at RPI, and then in collaboration with Babson College, while he was dean of the Business School.

We are similarly indebted to Jake Schonberger, Kyle Brody, Cory Goodenough, Jonny Rio, and Chase Darlington for letting us share their journeys through the startup process. The Pivot Startup methodology molds together ideas born of experience and research. The seed was first planted at General Motors, where a rising executive, Tim Costello, took the risk of recruiting a very brash young engineer, Remy, into the Methods ...