A systematic approach to innovation begins with changing how you see your company.
What are the main concepts in shifting from decision-making into questioning everything. It implies curiosity. By shifting from chief decision maker pushing down giving answers to chief experimenter you’re pulling up and asking questions.
Fundamentally you have to rely on experiments. There are three valuable outcomes to experimentation. Insights are not quantified to the degree you might wish but they do reduce uncertainty and they give insight into the unknown. Having options by pursuing your findings discovered through insights, create direction and put you into an alter or abandon state. From here strategic prototyping experimentation with customers or potential customers, and quickly gaining knowledge allows you to find a path.
At this stage you have fundamentally reduced risk. You have verbal descriptions of your product which result in virtual prototyping. That virtual prototyping test critical assumptions before scale. Most people then recognize your entering the phase of the minimum viable product. Of course after that stage if everything goes well you have a full-blown product.
This simple sketch I drew in early 2015 while at a marketplace company. We needed to shift from one product and discover an adjacent market in order to scale. It was unknown territory and very difficult to gain traction. By using this type of methodology, you realize there are many more steps before MVP then what you might be comfortable with. By taking the steps you actually speed product to market not slow it down.
In 2019 we see a lot more documentation and research on creativity and how it impacts innovation. The right to experiment as part of the business operating system that can’t be ignored.
