{"id":133651,"date":"2017-03-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-26T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qmarkets.net\/experimentation-and-innovation-the-bolder-way\/"},"modified":"2017-03-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-26T22:00:00","slug":"experimentation-and-innovation-the-bolder-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qmarkets.net\/he\/resources\/article\/experimentation-and-innovation-the-bolder-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimenting Your Way to Bolder Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colin Palombo, Managing Partner at Innovation Framework Technologies, explains how experimentation and innovation should work hand in hand to produce groundbreaking results. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Amazon is one of the most innovative companies on the planet \u2013 launching successful, bold new products and services on a regular basis. From dominating online retail, Amazon has extended into areas as diverse as AWS cloud computing services, drone package delivery, Kindle e-book readers, Prime video streaming and Echo home artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\"Innovation
Jeff Holden – "Build a team that has an experimental ethos"<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, states<\/a>: \u201cOur success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Diamandis, visionary founder of organizations like XPRIZE foundation, Human Longevity Inc and Planetary Resources Inc<\/a>, agrees: \u201cExperimentation is a crucial mechanism for driving breakthroughs in any organization. If you want to create a successful, hyper-growth company, you've got to focus on empowering your teams to rapidly experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most organizations don\u2019t test their innovation ideas with quick experiments to generate real-world evidence. Instead they rely on in-house opinions, or conversations with lead customers to vet ideas. When data-driven experiments are run (like market surveys),<\/a> they often take too long, cost too much or deliver little new insight to develop the idea.<\/p>\n

For example, at Amazon in the early days, many of the experiments conducted were found to be useless. Jeff Holden, Amazon\u2019s former Chief Product Officer (and now Uber\u2019s CPO) explains<\/a>: \u201cThe experiments had no chance of yielding any value. There wasn't any point to them. We were just kind of curious. We were just running a lot of experiments, which have a cost by the way, and were taking up slots so others couldn't experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

So how can companies use experiments to accelerate and de-risk great ideas, while killing or pivoting away from the bad ones? Here are four steps to include experimentation in your front end of innovation process: 1. Encourage bold\/crazy ideas 2. Select the best idea for experimentation 3. Use a rapid \u2018sprint\u2019 experiment process 4. Interpret results, accelerate action. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Innovation
X marks the spot – Google's moonshot factory<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Encourage Bold\/Crazy Ideas<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bold experimentation and innovation does not start with \u2018ho-hum\u2019 ideas. Running experiments on ideas for minor tweaks to your current offerings will be costly and demoralizing. Instead, start with a bold \u2018ideation challenge\u2019 \u2013 a statement that clearly identifies a big problem for your current customers, or an opportunity to serve new markets with unique, highly differentiated solutions.<\/p>\n

The challenge also specifies constraints to the problem and invites a diverse group of people to submit unconventional, unusual and potentially unfeasible ideas for solutions. The goal here is to explore the boundaries of the \u2018proximate future\u2019, from as many different perspectives as possible. Bold ideas could be based on using new technologies, business models, processes, services, partnerships or some other approach to create new value for customers.<\/p>\n

To get bolder ideas, you also must give license for people to think different, as Steve Jobs put it. Astro Teller, CEO of Google\u2019s moonshot factory<\/a>, does this by running a \u2018Get Weirder Award\u2019 – challenging people to ask \u2018weird\u2019 questions, put forth crazy ideas around framing problems differently and to design experiments that really push the limits. The award is given out every two weeks to the people who ran the best experiment in that time.<\/p>\n

Select the Best Idea for Experimentation and Innovation.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Once you have a hopper of bold\/crazy ideas for your Challenge, you next must select one or a cluster of them to perform the experiment on. Experiments require time commitment from employees, so you need to be selective in picking experiments that test critical questions for potential bold new solutions.<\/p>\n

Astro Teller uses the following three principles<\/a> to help identify good experiments:<\/p>\n