Tools and Methods for Quick Idea Validation
October 23rd, 2007 by binnur
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
– Peter Drucker
Innovation and risk goes hand in hand. Many initial attempts at trying something new fails. However, through those failures we learn, adopt and improve. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Part of establishing an innovation culture is about emphasizing importance of taking risks, trying new things and learning from each failure that comes with the territory. However, to be agile and be successful, you need to be quick at evaluating new ideas, and either moving them through the innovation funnel or killing them.
Tools and methods for performing quick validation of your ideas are the focus of this blog. Here, quick means anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days, and at most a couple of weeks.
One page project summary and/or press release
Start with refining and focusing your idea. A one page project summary and/or an imaginary press release are a great way to highlight your idea’s benefits and value. Your product pitch should include:
- Description of the product and service;
- Description of what customer problem it solves;
- Key customer benefits and features;
- Identification of key performance vectors;
- Positioning statement and value proposition;
- Indication of the logical customers and markets;
- Estimates of market potential, profitability and price;
- Fanciful customer comments and raves;
Your goal is to generate interest and excitement with your sponsors and potential customers. Any reaction less than an interest is a good indication of either needing to rework your product pitch or your idea.
Build your idea pre-screening criteria
Evaluate each of your ideas against your pre-screening criteria. The goal is to identify and ditch poor ideas early in the innovation life cycle process. You should evaluate all ideas based on business and technical criteria, such as below.
- How well the idea fits within the firm: vision, mission, objectives, core competencies, resources, …
- How well is the idea protected: IP, any barriers to entry to discourage competition, …
- What is the competitor landscape and do they have an alternative solution;
- What is the impact of the idea on existing technology and resources;
- What are the profit goals and metrics, what is the ROI;
- What is the market size and growth;
As a note of caution, you should monitor your pass/fail idea metrics here. Too many passes, i.e. ideas moving forward in the innovation funnel, could highlight a poor pre-screening criteria. Along the same lines, too many fails, ideas dismissed, could indicate you are dismissing potentially good ideas and being too conservative.
Prototyping and Fast Prototyping
Prototyping is a great way to explore the idea on hands-on way.
- Provides quick validation of the concept, and identification of risks and uncertainties;
- Gives insights into new competencies to be developed and cultural changes that need to occur;
- Enables a tangible way to explore the problem space with others;
- Becomes a vehicle for demonstrating your idea, possible product design and feature set with your customers;
Killer Innovations’ Phil McKinney takes this a step further and introduces the concept of fast prototypes: hours and at most days (vs. weeks). Please remember, these fast prototypes are not functional, as the goal is to get early feedback on the idea.
Tom Kelley in the The Art of Innovation
“Prototyping is problem solving. It’s a culture and a language. You can prototype just about anything – a new product or service, or a special promotion. What counts is moving the ball forward, achieving some part of your goal.
Not wasting time.”
Get in the head of your customer
Focus on what problems you are solving with your product and how it benefits your customers. Does it save time or money, enable new revenue stream or improve the quality of their existing solution? Describe your ideal customer, and where possible engage in exploration and validation activities with them. You can explore through in-depth reviews and open-ended questions, or just observe them in their own environment doing day-to-day activities. These observations can help understand in what ways your idea would benefit the customer, as well as identify any unarticulated needs and problems.
If real-life exploration is not possible, create a storyboard of your typical customer through brainstorming, associations and role-playing. As crazy as this sounds, it will give you a sense of whom you are targeting: what they are worried about, what they care about and what they would pay for. In return, this becomes a platform for you to test your ideas: Would Susie pay extra for that feature?.
Co-Design with your customers
Involve your customers in your innovation process. Simple UI mock-ups, web-conference discussions on their impressions and insights can clarify any potential issues in advance. You can also rely on your customers to help make the needed tradeoffs in product functionality.
Connect with the experts: inside & outside the company
In identifying and understanding possibilities, risks and uncertainties, tap into the experts. Just like opinion polls, these experts could provide insights and observations based on their experiences and knowledge. They can also help craft scenarios and perform scenario analysis.
Note of caution, the inputs from the experts are their best guestimation and judgment based on what is known. To reduce the bias and improve the results you can utilize tools such as the Delphi method.
Final thoughts…
- Teams tagged for validation need to have the time to focus on this activity. If full time availability is not an option, enable the employees to spend 15-30% of their working time on innovative projects and research.
- Establish a cross-functional team. Technology is an enabler, and sole focus on technology will not ensure product success in the market.
- Nothing is certain in life, except death. So, if after all the validation a failure occurs (and it will occur) in another stage, that is part of life and the learning process.
Technorati Tags: idea pre-screening, quick idea validation
See Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship for an exploration of Purposeful Innovation and the Seven Sources of Innovative Opportunity plus the contrast with the Bright Idea. The fundamental starting question might be: “What needs doing?”
Also there is a Drucker interview on Entrepreneurship and Innovation that appeared in Business Week several years ago.
Google: bobembry drucker innovation entrepreneurship
Bob,
Thank you for the pointers to Drucker. For those looking for the Business Week article, here is the direct link Bob indicated.
As always, Drucker is quite insightful and very direct. Here is a telling quote from the article, which I enjoyed reading:
“In this country we by and large still believe that entrepreneurship is having a great idea and that innovation is largely R&D, which is technical. Of course we know that entrepreneurship is a discipline, a fairly rigorous one, and that innovation is an economic not a technical term, and entrepreneurship creates a new business. That’s not news. In fact, it’s what made Edison so successful more than a century ago. But American businesses with few exceptions—Merck, Intel, and Citibank come to mind—still seem to think that innovation is a “flash of genius,” not a systematic, organized, rigorous discipline.”