Innovations “Iron Triangle”

Posted on January 29, 2021 Updated on February 2, 2021

The concept of an Iron Triangle is that along each side of the triangle is one item that is constrained by the items from the other two sides. In Project Management this is often referred to as a triple constraint. This identifies the fundamental relationships (such as Time, Cost, and Scope in Project Management) without addressing related aspects such as Risk and Quality. It provides a simple understanding of both requirements and tradeoffs.

Yesterday I spoke with Dave Mosby, an impressive person with an equally impressive background. He related Innovation to Fire, noting that in order to create fire you need fuel, oxygen, and heat. He added that they need to be in the right combination to achieve the desired flame. What a brilliant analogy.

Dave stated that for Corporate Innovation to succeed you need the proper balance of Innovation, Capital, and Entrepreneurship. I found this enlightening because his description substituted “entrepreneurship” for “culture” in my existing mental model. While the difference is subtle, I found it to be important.

As noted above, simplified frameworks do not provide a complete understanding. But, they do help understand and plan around the foundational items required for success. Mapping this to past experiences I was able to gain a better understanding of things that did not move forward as desired, and what I could have done differently in order to be more effective.

One idea was to create a fault-tolerant database using Red Hat’s JBoss middleware. We had a Services partner willing to create a working prototype, tune it for performance, document the system requirements and configuration, and package it for easy deployment. They wanted was $10K to cover their costs.

At the time I did not hold a budget of my own so created a purchase request supported by a logical justification. It modeled potential revenue increases for database subscriptions based on the need for a failover installation, as well as growth from potential expanded use cases. This was a slam dunk!

In my mind, this was simple as it was “only $10K,” and I had funded many similar efforts when I had my own company. But that’s the rub. I viewed these efforts as investments in understanding, lessons learned, and growth. Not every investment had a direct payoff, but nearly each one of them had an indirect payoff for my company. It was an entrepreneurial mindset that accepted risk as something required for rewards and success. I now see, many years later, how reframing my proposal as a way to foster innovation and entrepreneurship could have been far more effective.

It is never too late to gain new insights and lessons learned. And, a slightly different perspective on an important topic provided the understanding that should help with positioning projects for success in the future. And this flowed from a discussion with an interesting person who has, “been there, done that” many times.