What’s intriguing about commercially successful innovation is what actually succeeds. The most disruptive initiatives of our age are very rarely technology breakthroughs! WhatsApp didn’t become the western world’s default messaging platform or Dropbox the consumer cloud storage standard through more advanced technology. They did it, quite simply, by developing a more intuitive user experience.
The key to disruption then, is not just figuring out where the pain is and servicing it, but also designing that solution in a way that people want to consume it.
This is where the ideas behind the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) emanate from. You want to replicate the product experience without blowing your entire budget on it, so if you fail, then you fail fast.
But the idea is not to get the quickest solution to market and sell it to anybody who wants it. An MVP also has to be a viable product. What you’re trying to do is to validate a market and your ability to service it.
Focusing on broad markets with products that transcend them just ‘to see what the user has a use for’ simply doesn’t work. This is mainstream thinking in an early market. A new tech company has to be smarter and braver than that. They should build around a grand vision of one market segment at a time. So, that they still have the runway to pivot if need be.
Or at least, that is the theory.
The reality behind ‘failing fast’ is somewhat different, because nobody wants to fail at all and there are very few lists of ‘companies I failed fast with’ on a resumé! Society doesn’t reward fast failure either, it rewards experience; even if that experience is of running a company that was on a path to distress from the get-go.
This is what you’ve got to understand if you want to be successful in innovation.
It’s near impossible to build an MVP for many innovations without spending an inordinate amount of money and manpower doing so. Failing fast then, in fact, failing at all; quickly stops being an option.
So many of the problems that I see in innovation setups start from here. Human’s have reputations they want to preserve and value that they want to protect. We’re taught to persevere and judged on our resilience, usually by people who have never done anything disruptive in their life.
This is why, with very few exceptions, the most successful innovation nearly always emerges out of existing work experience. Where you can learn about the opportunity and the time and the resource required to develop it on someone else’s dime.
The thinking behind failing fast is right on the money then, so long as you are able to handle that both financially and emotionally. And most people just aren’t!
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