To succeed with profitable innovations, you have to be running enough business model improvement tests, have some succeed, and take the right next steps.
How can you get the optimal innovation into the market faster? It's hard to innovate until you have a successful idea that has been tested. How many tests will succeed? As few as none, and probably no more than ten percent.
So, unless you are testing at least ten opportunities initially, you may initially find nothing to implement. Should you have fewer than ten items to test, you need to go back looking for more proposals. A typical experience is finding appropriate proposals for about a third of the opportunities.
Looking at the optimistic side, let's assume that you tested many areas, some of them did well, and you now have two or more tests to implement throughout your company. Do you make the several changes at once, or stagger when you make them? If you stagger them, in what order and over how much time should the staggering take place?
Don't even think about those questions, however, until you consider what else must be done before you can implement. You may need some new software, a changed operational process, or new measurements. Or you may need to provide more information for employees and customers.
By involving all your functions that will probably be affected by the change, you now need to turn the test experience into an implementation project proposal. However you decide to do that, be sure to keep the testing team as part of the group that will make and implement the project proposal. They are your insurance that the full-scale expansion of the test is just that, and not a drift off into a different, and untested direction.
If a new test is appropriate to improve on what you just learned, by all means ask for another test proposal and launch it. But avoid letting a new test hijack the potential implementation of the successful test you already have in hand.
After you have project proposals for what has been successfully tested, get those who worked on the proposals to debate whether they should be implemented simultaneously or sequentially. Investigate the facts behind whatever assertions are made. In such evaluations, mole hills are often described as mountains and potential earthquakes are sometimes swept temporarily under the rug.
Unless there is a strong case for holding up the availability of one of the new benefits, any uncertainty should be decided in favor of making the benefits available as soon as possible. It's a fast moving world out there, and the positive results you're expecting could be lost if someone else moves first.
Undoubtedly, competitors may well be aware of your testing, and may be able to get to market first. For that reason, be sure that you've come to a conclusion on what to do next within 30 days (at the latest) after a test has been concluded and reported to the organization.
Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
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