Hi Victor, thanks for your comments. Like you Steve Blank has been excellent at simplifying problems but when you do get into these more complex innovation challenges it does get harder. Actually Steve’s work on Hacking for Defense classes across the US – giving students the opportunity to perform national service by solving real defense/diplomacy problems using Lean Methods is chasing after complex problems so you are right in raising this to compare. Hat-tip back to you

Yet what I felt came out of this paper by Deborah Dougherty was trying to determine where to place a change in emphasis on managing discovery in innovation complexity, emphasizing the greater need to network, collaborate, to step back and do different levels of evaluation by taking knowledge and exploring and reshaping it far more, maybe less for a specific purpose as the going in to solve a problem but to open up to alternatives and different ways to tackle these challenges and problems.

One of the messages I got from reading this paper was exploring more, deeper and wider, with different lens and positions of insight and experience can open up to a wider set of possibilities. In Steves work, he is imposing time consciously in what actions to explore and undertake in scarce resource situations, constantly tightening the focus, adjusting step by step. The alternative is to take a longer time in evaluation and alternatives to unlock complexity and then, no question, you can employ the Lean methodology to that.