Alberto Savoia

Rise Of The Apex Innovators 

We have entered a new era in business. An era in which a few giant and incredibly successful companies have mastered the skills to continue to grow and innovate with the agility of startups. Alberto Savoia, calls these outliers Apex Innovators.

In his 2011 article “Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google1”, Savoia introduced the concept of Innovation Potential. He argued that large companies can, and should, use their size, resources and market success not as reasons to become more cautious and conservative, but as incentives be ever more adventurous, more daring, and more experimental. To continue to grow and innovate like the entrepreneurial startup that they once were, they had to think and act accordingly. Savoia discovered and forged new tools and techniques designed to help already great companies unleash their innovators to become even greater. He called his new approach pretotyping.

In 2012, Savoia delivered the ?rst pretotyping workshop “Innovate Like A Startup, Invest Like A Grown-Up” at the Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The workshop received the highest ratings ever for such a program. Savoia realized that he was on to something very promising, very important–and very needed. Over the next four years, he worked with Google, Stanford and a number of world-leading companies to further develop, test and re?ne the tools and techniques of pretotyping. And, in 2016, at Google and Stanford, he launched his “Apex Innovators” seminars and workshop.

Apex Innovators don’t use their giant size as an excuse for slowing down–they use it as a unique advantage, and combine it with pretotyping to accelerate, explore, and win with new products ... and in new markets. The reward for these companies? Double-digit growth! Year after year. With no end in sight. This is not supposed to happen, that rate of growth is reserved for small companies not $10-50B+/yr industry giants. But it is happening. And it’s a tornado on the competitive landscape.

Apex Innovators have upped the ante, rewritten the rules, and set new standards. Companies once considered innovation leaders can, at best, be called “moderately innovative” when compared to today’s Apex Innovators. And “moderately innovative” does not cut it these days.

Alberto Savoia’s “Rise Of The Apex Innovators” seminars and workshops, the same ones he offers at Google and Stanford, are designed speci?cally for already large and well-established companies–market leaders–that are ready to use their size and resources to their advantage and join the ranks of the Apex Innovators.
Innovate Like a Startup, Go to Market Like a Grownup

Large organizations have enormous innovation potential at their disposal. The number of innovative products and services that reach the market and succeed, however, is a very small fraction of that potential. The quantity and type of innovation a company achieves is directly related to the way it approaches, fosters, selects, and funds innovation efforts. Large companies tend to build upon and around their past and current successes which leads them to a very narrow innovation spectrum and inhibits most breakthrough innovation.

In this presentation, based on his Stanford workshop by the same title, Alberto Savoia leverages his own experiences as both a successful serial startup entrepreneur and as an “innovation agitator” at Google to show you how already established and successful companies can innovate like startups, but also leverage their existing resources and market reach to significantly increase their odds of market success with innovative products.

Unleash the Innovators—Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google

Google does many things differently, and the way it approaches innovation is one of the most distinctive aspects of its culture, and something most large companies could learn from.

In this presentation, Google’s early employee and Innovation Agitator Alberto Savoia describes how the company’s core belief that “great innovation can come from anyone at any time” has shaped its culture and its practices, and has led to some of its most notable successes. From Google’s famous “20% time” rule that gives employees one day a week to pursue their own projects, to its flat organizational structure and the unique role of managers, to its data-driven process for testing new ideas to ensure fast failure, Alberto will explain how Google has managed to keep true to its startup roots and core beliefs as it grew into one of the largest companies in the world. Finally, Alberto explains how any company can successfully adapt Google’s innovation practices to their existing culture.

The Pretotyping Manifesto—Make Sure You Are Building the Right It Before You Build It Right

Have you ever poured your heart, blood, sweat, tears and money to build, perfect and launch an innovative "can't miss" new product or feature ... and then discovered that your "can't miss" idea turned out to be something that few customers actually wanted or needed? We call this scenario "The Innovator's Nightmare" and it's something that most innovative companies have to deal with because, as decades of data show, most new products and most innovations fail in the market.

Pretotyping, an innovation technique developed and perfected at Google and now taught at Stanford and many other organizations and companies, can help you avoid "The Innovator's Nightmare" by helping you make sure that you are building the right 'it' before you invest too much time and money to build 'it' right. In addition, pretotyping helps you make the most of your innovation potential, because it makes it possible for you to explore and test, quickly and cheaply, new “crazy” ideas that would normally be dismissed as too risky or expensive to try. By combining these two benefits of pretotyping, an established and successful company can maximize its chances for successful breakthrough innovation.

In this presentation Alberto Savoia, former Google Innovation Agitator, Engineering Director and one of its most popular speakers, will introduce the basic principles, techniques, tools and metrics for pretotyping, with many real-world examples and case studies.