For many of us, uncertainty can be nerve-racking. That reaction, however, obscures a crucial fact: Uncertainty and possibility are two sides of the same coin. Chances are, your biggest achievements and transformational moments all came after a period of uncertainty--one that probably felt stressful but that you pushed through to accomplish something great. Uncertainty doesn't have to be paralyzing. After studying innovators and changemakers who handle it well and reviewing research on resilience and tolerance for ambiguity, the authors have found that the following four principles can help: (1) Reframe your situation by focusing on the potential upside. (2) Prime yourself by taking small risks and reducing uncertainty in other areas of your life. (3) Take a series of modest actions instead of making bet-the-farm moves. And (4) Sustain yourself by recasting setbacks and focusing on things that have true meaning for you.

Many companies looking for breakthroughs struggle to move beyond incremental ideas, because cognitive biases trap people in the status quo and prevent them from seeing big opportunities. But four tactics can help firms overcome biases and think far more creatively: (1) Science fiction. Sci-fi writers have foreseen all kinds of innovations. When Lowe's invited some in to envision its future, it got ideas for augmented reality phones, service robots, 3-D printing, and other new technologies that boosted sales. (2) Analogies. These can help innovators make big leaps too. For instance, when Charlie Merrill applied the analogy of a supermarket to the brokerage business, he changed the industry. (3) First principles logic. Often it helps to reexamine foundational assumptions and rebuild from the ground up. That's how Regeneron cut drug development costs 80%. (4) Exaptation. Why do we use something for one purpose and not another? Asking that question led to the creation of the Flex-Foot, a revolutionary prosthetic that doesn't look anything like a foot but acts like one.

As digital disruption expands, many legacy businesses seek partnerships with tech companies to maintain competitiveness in the digital sphere. But instead of a centralized "hub"partnership, some companies find greater success through an adaptive ecosystem model, where partners develop significant projects or innovations together. This type of strategy requires imagination and flexibility.

Following the path of companies such as Apple and Amazon, more and more firms are trying to become not just product purveyors but also platform providers, facilitating direct connections between customers and other groups. Although launching a platform can generate new revenue, success is not automatic. After studying more than 20 companies that have tried to move from products to platforms, the authors point to four practices that can separate winners from losers: (1) Start with a defensible product and a critical mass of users. A strong product and a loyal customer base will attract third parties to your platform. (2) Apply a hybrid business model. Instead of operating with a "product mindset" or a "platform mindset" alone, combine the two in order to discover new opportunities for creating value. (3) Drive rapid conversion to the platform. Existing customers are likely to flock to a platform if it provides enough new value, if the additional products and services offered are consistent with your brand, and if users have opportunities to improve both the products and the platform. (4) Deter competitive imitation. Make it tough for rivals to copy your product-to-platform strategy: Consider creating proprietary standards, using exclusivity contracts, and erecting other barriers to competition.

Responding to disruptive innovation may be one of the greatest challenges managers in established firms face. On the one hand, they've been warned that disruption can sneak up and destroy their business. On the other, experience tells them that disruptions can take years, even decades, to play out. And some that threaten never occur at all. Whether a company moves too early to adopt a disruptive technology or too late, it ends up wasting resources and squandering competitive advantage. In this article, the authors outline an effective way to mange the uncertain transition from an established technology, service, or business model to a disruptive one. Companies should develop hybrids, which combine elements from a disruptive technology with the current technology to create a new offering that sits between competing innovation generations: Think Prius, which combines elements from both internal combustion and electric engines. The authors identify seven types of hybrids that companies can use, depending on whether a disruption is already under way, just getting started, and/or a distant possibility.

Like any corporate operation, innovation requires effective leadership. But it's a different kind than the core business calls for, involving skills and tactics many executives have yet to master. The authors' study of companies that consistently launch novel offerings and enter new markets reveals the process that successful innovation leaders follow--one that draws on risk-reduction ideas developed over the past 50 years. This process, which the authors call the innovator's method, is at heart a journey of discovery, and so the role of the person leading it is to set other people down a path and demonstrate a willingness to push boundaries and embrace uncertainty. Indeed, the innovation leader is not the chief decision maker but the chief experimenter, helping to identify critical assumptions on which new offerings are based, fashion experiments to test those assumptions with customers, and interpret the results. Preparing the organization to accept novel ideas is a crucial part of the job. Innovation leaders can do that by emphasizing that the process is aimed at minimizing the risks of innovation in the same way that other organizational processes minimize core operational risks. Finally, the innovation leader must give team members not just time (uninterrupted blocks are best) but also the resources and tools to explore the unknown.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Capturing new growth opportunities is fundamental to strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. These days, experimentation and improvisational change are in. But how should managers address the challenge? The answer, the authors argue, can be more complex and more crucial to a company's success than previously thought. Their research on mature corporations, growing businesses and new ventures suggests a paradoxical tension between focus and flexibility that can define or break a business. Based on more than 150 interviews with managers at 30 companies in North America, Europe and Asia, the authors conclude that focus is still critical and may be just as important as flexibility. What's more, they conclude that a company's focus may influence its flexibility and vice versa. There are two components to capturing a new business opportunity: opportunity selection and opportunity execution. Opportunity selection involves determining which customer problem to solve, whereas opportunity execution deals with solving the problem. The authors point out that most books, articles and thought leaders focus on opportunity execution -how to create value by developing solutions. But research suggests that innovation initiatives often move so quickly to identify a solution that the innovators have to cycle back to figure out which problem they are actually solving. The authors found that opportunity selection appears to matter as much as opportunity execution. More importantly, how managers approach opportunity selection (whether with flexibility or with focus) has a critical impact on how successful they are at opportunity execution. The authors observed that managers and entrepreneurs tend to fall into two groups: opportunists and strategists. Opportunists rely on a less scripted and more flexible approach to opportunity selection, letting emergent customer inquiries shape opportunity selection.

The Tesla case provides multiple opportunities to discuss core strategy and innovation topics, such as: • Patterns of innovation, e.g., new technologies competing to replace older generations • Types of disruption, e.g., low-end versus high-end • The innovation ecosystem, e.g., thinking beyond a single technology to the interdependence of an ecosystem of supporting technologies • Systems strategy, e.g., thinking beyond the product to understand the role of technology architecture and systems • The innovation process, e.g. learning under conditions of uncertainty, scaling up for execution.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Markets are changing, competition is shifting, and businesses may be suffering or perhaps thriving. Whatever the immediate circumstances, corporate managers ask the same questions: where do we go from here, and which strategy will get us there? To understand how to choose the right strategy at the right time, the authors analyzed the logic of the leading strategic frameworks used in business and engineering schools around the world. They matched those frameworks with the key strategic choices faced by dozens of industry leaders at different times, during periods of stability and of change. Two insights emerged from their analysis. First, the frameworks divided into three archetypes: strategies of position, strategies of leverage, and strategies of opportunity. What's right for a company depends on its circumstances, its available resources, and how management combines those resources. Second, many of the assumptions about competitive advantage didn't hold. For example, although strategy gurus talk about strategically valuable resources, sometimes competitive advantage came from very ordinary resources assembled well. To figure out when it makes sense to pursue strategies of position, leverage, or opportunity, the authors advise managers to understand their company's immediate circumstances, take stock of their current resources, and determine the relationships among the various resources. Understanding these factors, they argue, will help managers select the right strategic framework.