The way I define innovation is the ability to rapidly respond to new learnings and new information. The primary input to innovation is actually a culture. It's a mindset. It's an openness to learning.

My advice is: get started. Get started now, learn the lessons, figure things out. Some things that you do are not going to work. That's just a fact. Other things are going to work for a plethora of reasons. One of which is that timing and circumstances that happened to triangulate in your favour.

We started planning to launch the GetSmarter business in 2006. The reality is that we had thought at that stage that these online short courses with university partners were going to be a bridge for us to get to what we thought was the real golden goose, which was full degree programmes and Master's qualifications online.

Earlier we discussed that the tension between the certainty required to motivate people, to move forward, to come and join your company, to get investments and so on - needs to be balanced with an openness to the fact that you are very much on a learning journey. Until you actually put something out to market, you really don't know.

There's a tension between humility and the conviction of spirit that is required in order to drive new behavior, new activities. It's very dangerous thinking to say that you must be one or the other. In fact, it's about the interplay between those two. There are times where you need to strongly drive new ideas into the organization with that degree of conviction. There are times simultaneously where you need to be fully open. In order to foster an innovative culture, one of the primary responsibilities of a leader is clear communication.

Businesses are just humans coming together, and it's a very human experience. There's this temptation, particularly of leadership, to try and not be human with their teams. They try to say, "This is it! This is certainty! This is where we're going!" - as opposed to saying, "I'm just another human also trying to figure out the way of the world and the future of this business. Here's our best thinking, but here's what could go wrong. And here's where we need you to muck in and help us figure out" - and to keep that dialogue very open and very human.

My sense is that if disruption is your end-point, you're probably going to get it wrong nine out of 10 times. If adding value to your customers is your end-point, disruption is almost certainly going to be a natural byproduct. We must be continuously focusing on the customer: What are their pain points? What are the issues? What are the ways that we could make this simpler better, faster?

My encouragement is not to think about the big moments. It's not the big moments that constitute success. It's the small incremental steps that you're taking all the time and the learnings that are taking place. The real stuff is in the day to day minutiae. It's in the trenches, figuring out how to solve problems. 

It was a very difficult time, we nearly lost the business. The game of entrepreneurship is actually a game of learning. If you're not learning the lessons and ultimately tweaking your business, product, marketing channels, then you're not going to ultimately succeed in the business. I like to often say that the primary currency of business is in fact learning. The secondary currency is cash.

In any new business, the work that you do on yourself is the precursor to any of the business success. We often had a saying at GetSmarter that human performance precedes operational performance, which precedes financial performance.