Innovation and reinvention as a daily business practice

Executive overview

Most businesses rely on past models until a competitor or crisis forces change. Josh Linkner argues that innovation is not a rare talent or a massive undertaking — it is a learnable habit accessible to everyone.

The core shift is treating creativity as a muscle: practice small acts of innovation daily, apply it across all areas of the business, and run low-risk experiments rather than betting on single big ideas.

Reinvention is not optional — standing still is the highest-risk move in a changing market.

Finding opportunity in overlooked places

• The St. Regis Hotel filled empty closets with hand-selected Neiman Marcus items, creating a new revenue stream at zero capital cost.
• Dead assets and mundane routines are often the richest source of innovation.
• Test ideas in one location before scaling — de-risks the creative process.
• Selling more to existing customers is underrated; complacency opens the door to disruption.
• Companies that fail to reinvent (Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster) follow a predictable pattern — success breeds complacency, then displacement.

Looking outside your own category for solutions

• Cattle researchers solved a fly problem by studying zebras — 70% reduction in fly bites, $2.2B potential annual savings.
• The breakthrough came only after obvious solutions (pesticides, bug zappers) failed.
• Disruptors are often outsiders: Elon Musk had no car industry background before Tesla; Jack Dorsey had none in payments before Square.
• Look for problems first; the bigger the problem, the more likely the easy answers have already been tried.

Deconstructing your process to find performance gains

• Hot dog competitor Kobayashi doubled the 90-year world record by reinventing how he ate — separating meat from bun, dunking the bun in water — not by eating faster.
• The instinct under pressure is to do the same things faster; the better move is to deconstruct the process.
• Map processes as a team to surface invisible bottlenecks, then experiment on the small parts.
• Innovation applies to HR, operations, distribution, pricing — not only product or marketing.

Building a daily innovation habit

• Practice for 15 minutes a day — the same way a musician builds technique.
• Do small, unfamiliar things regularly: change your route, reorder your routine, try something new.
• Brainstorming fails because fear filters out bold ideas early — let the right brain run first, tone down later.
• Aim for 10X thinking: it forces genuine reinvention rather than incremental gain, and the double result follows.
• All humans have creative capacity; it is not a superpower reserved for a select few.

Responding to disruption in any business climate

• Businesses facing a crisis should use the disruption as a forcing function to examine every element: product, pricing, distribution, packaging, sourcing.
• Businesses doing well are at risk of complacency — stability in a changing market is illusory.
• The Frogger principle: leap from one solid surface to the next; standing still means falling into the river.
• Compartmentalise what is genuinely untouchable (regulation, safety) and innovate everywhere else.