My partner, Rita McGrath recently published a must-read overview of the Discovery Driven Growth process first outlined in her seminal book, Discovery Driven Growth, published with Ian C. MacMillian in 2009. The intro is below with a link to the full article at the end. Enjoy!

Growth programs need a different plan for progress than the operating business needs

Executives without experience in bringing new ventures to life — whether as entrepreneurs, business leaders, those with transformation responsibilities or other change agents — often think that planning a new venture is like planning for an existing business. It isn’t. It really isn’t, as I’ve written about for many years.

One of the main differences is that new ventures are best planned to take advantage of option value. You do this by working through a series of checkpoints so that as you meet each checkpoint, your knowledge increases, and your confidence that investment is merited can increase. The watchword is to plan to the next checkpoint with great determination, then stop, look at what you’re learned, and plan to the subsequent checkpoint. It sounds simple, and it is, but it can feel terribly unfamiliar to those who are new to the whole high-uncertainty, venturing world. In this article, I’ll lay out 20 checkpoints that most new ventures will go through, though not necessarily all, and not necessarily in this sequence. I’ve therefore not numbered them.

You can read the entire article here.