Major league innovation.

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It’s October, and if you’re an American sports fan, you’re probably choosing sides in the upcoming World Series – the culmination of Major League Baseball’s season. But are you reflecting on what you as a manager could learn from the winning team?

When you think about it, a corporate executive on the hook for delivering growth-fueling innovation has much in common with a ball club’s general manager. Both are constantly shifting their lineups, and both have stakeholders demanding immediate results. Vindication for wise choices sometimes doesn’t come for years, and even the best leaders lose more games than expected along the way.

Is it possible that the similarities extend beyond the challenges? Could the ways that general managers solve their problems translate to business? In at least three major areas, it seems so. If you’re an innovation manager struggling to predict the success of potential new offerings, develop promising ideas and assemble a balanced portfolio of growth initiatives, the best kind of inspiration may come from the nearest ballpark.

Discover what really indicates success
Famously, the Sabermetrics revolution in baseball (named for its basis in research conducted by members of the Society for American Baseball Research, and described by Michael Lewis in “Moneyball”) has taught general managers and fans how to zero in on the real predictors of performance in the big leagues and the decisions that win games. As an executive managing a portfolio of innovation initiatives, you need to develop the same willingness to go beyond long-held assumptions and simplistic metrics.

Consider Jeff Bagwell and Jeff Ballard, the former a slugging first baseman who had an illustrious career, the latter a pitcher whose performance was lackluster – save for one sterling season. Obviously, Bagwell would have been the better player to bet on, but could a general manager have predicted his success?

Not if, as was long the practice, he overlooked minor league statistics. Given the difference between the majors and the minors in level of play, talent scouts traditionally dismissed the outcomes of minor league games and instead looked for the physical attributes and skills that equipped a player for high-level competition. Few complained, therefore, when in 1990 the Boston Red Sox traded Bagwell to the Houston Astros for an aging left-handed reliever. While Bagwell had racked up hits in the minors, he wasn’t much of a third baseman (his position at the time). Worse, he was squat and had an unorthodox swing.

Bagwell went on to slug 449 home runs during his career and collected the National League’s Most Valuable Player award in 1994. The few students of the game who had seen his potential spotted it because they’d devised some simple algorithms to translate minor league statistics into major league equivalents.

The implication for business innovation managers is that a more insightful analysis of available information can overturn orthodoxy and inspire better tactics, investment decisions and personnel management. Perhaps the scientific approach will never go quite so far in the realm of management since the data to support similar statistical analysis simply don’t exist.

The innovation manager isn’t helpless, however. Research continues to highlight historical patterns of success that can make the market performance of a given innovation more predictable – and that challenge the conventional wisdom about how to choose among competing investment proposals.

Build your organization’s depth chart
A depth chart reflects a team’s level of investment in different areas – the bench strength backing up every position. It signals much about strategic priorities, such as where risks are perceived to be highest and redundancy most necessary. Companies should think in the same ways about their innovation portfolios. Do they have a balance of offensive and defensive strategies? Are they consciously exploring new channels or geographies?

Of course, a baseball depth chart begins with what everyone agrees is the right dimension on which the team must be diversified: Its player positions and whether the team has sufficient coverage of the pitcher’s mound, first base and so forth. Further, general managers seek players who throw with different hands and have varying skills.

For corporate managers, what constitutes a usefully diverse innovation portfolio can be less clear. Too often, as they field one close-to-the-core line extension after another, they persuade themselves that they are diversifying, perhaps because the new offerings target quite different consumer segments. Yet these managers may be missing a more important dimension across which they should be spreading their bets. For example, is it wise to design all innovations to move through the same channels? Don’t be unprepared for what might seem to come out of left field.

Develop potential in the minor leagues
Baseball’s farm system holds lessons by analogy: Most professional ball clubs oversee several levels of teams, and even the best prospects spend a few years in the lower levels before heading to “the show.”

One rationale for the multitiered system is that talent of a major league caliber isn’t always obvious when a player is young. An extensive minor league system allow teams to identify the players with sufficient talent to perform at the major league level, and it also allows coaches to work with players to address identified limitations in lower-pressure environments.

Let’s apply this analogy to packaged goods companies. For them, making it to the show means scoring scarce shelf space in a large retailer like Wal-Mart. Such retailers can be brutally discriminating. If in its first few weeks a new product doesn’t appear capable of selling well enough to earn that real estate, its career is over. But research on innovation shows that almost nothing springs perfectly formed from the heads of designers; about the only thing you can count on is that you won’t get the strategy right on day one. Exposing ideas to the mass market too early increases both the likelihood of failure and its economic impact. It doesn’t provide room for learning to occur.

What would it mean to create a minor league system for product and service innovations? To be sure, companies have long made use of test-market research and regional rollouts. The key is to deliberately organize such activities into a system whereby new offerings face steadily increasing levels of scrutiny from prospective customers and become stronger in the process.

Procter & Gamble, for example, first distributed a potentially game-changing baby care product to a handful of consumers at an amusement park and then began selling the product over the Internet. In a 2008 discussion P&G’s chairman, A.G. Lafley told me, “I’ve become a pretty big believer in getting the idea or technology to some relatively clear concept expression and some relatively crude prototype as fast as you possibly can, and then (getting) that in front of prospective customers.” Like any great general manager, he knows not to launch new players into the big leagues without proof points along the way.

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