No innovator fails because they couldn’t build their product. They fail because no one found value in what they built. Here’s what usually happens when someone gets a new idea:
Their mind starts racing with all the possibilities of what it could turn into, the impact it could have on the world and all the money it could generate. Next, they begin executing on their idea. All of their focus is internal, working hard to come in on time and on budget. They need to make this product amazing. First impressions are everything.
Then, they work on marketing. The product needs a catchy name and logo. It needs beautiful collateral, both online and offline. This has to look innovative. Finally, they take the product to market and, more often than not, get an extremely lukewarm reception. So they blame marketing, and they blame the product for not having enough features. Sometimes they bring new members onto the team and start the cycle from scratch. Sometimes they just run out of resources and the project gets mothballed.
Sadly, this is the typical cycle of innovation. Most new initiatives fail.
But successful innovators know that they have a very powerful tool at their disposal to significantly decrease the risk of innovation — experimentation.
Experiments are small bets that you make to see if what you believe to be true is actually true — to see if your predictions about the customer and the market are right. It’s something small that you do today to prove that you are spending time and money on the right things — on building something that people will buy.
In All in Startup, the reader meets Owen after he has followed the very process outlined above and wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars and a year of his life building something that wasn’t meeting any of his projections. What could he have done before he committed his available resources to executing his plan, to make sure customers would be waiting for him when the product was ready? He should have run some experiments!
But the hardest thing about experiments is running them correctly.
To run a good experiment, you need to determine and document six elements before you begin: the goal, the hypothesis, the subject, the logistics, the currency and the success and failure criteria. To learn more about each element and get tips on how to successfully experiment, read the full article here.
Diana Kander is a successful entrepreneur and Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest nonprofit in the world dedicated to entrepreneurship and education. She is also a New York Times best-selling author, public speaker, consultant and writer and advises founders and Fortune 500 executives on her methodology for launching customer-focused products and services. For more of Kander’s story about innovation risk management and running a good experiment, visit her blog.
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