Test ideas early, cheaply
I attended an Emerging Technologies Conference at Iowa State University recently and a couple of things came out that I found interesting.
The main reason I went was the keynote given by Michael Schrage who is an author, former newspaper columnist and does something at MIT now on innovation within organizations.
You can read more on this talk from my friend Tom who is working with this cool dude, Nick, who I haven’t yet met.
The main point I took from his talk is that ideas are cheap and easy to come up with, but not enough is done by organizations to actually implement those ideas.
His other big, huge point is to test your ideas early and cheaply.
Refuse to fund any good ideas unless there is an early testing phase. Try to align a good idea with a cheap form of testing it.
He said innovation at most companies should serve three main purposes. 1) Makes the products and services better for the customer 2) is cheaper for the business 3) and simpler for your staff, which he admits kills 50 percent of innovation efforts.
He spoke a lot about the economics of innovation and he centered this part on what he called the reduction of uncertainty. He said it’s not so much the fear of failure at organizations rather it’s the cost of failure that keeps many from doing cool stuff in the innovation area.
When you change the economics of ideation and testing you dramatically expand the number of things you can do. You then have focus.
So how do you do this? For one, he says every organization should create a consensus definition for the word simple.
It is not about who has the most features, it is about who has the best features that people can use.
Second, have an innovation risk management plan. His line here is “get a dollars worth of innovation for 50 cents.” He calls it having 80/20/20 vision: 80 percent of the necessary information, 20 percent of the time and 20 percent of the resources.
Just one person’s perspective, but I do think there are some good things here.
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