Innovator's Playbook

5AExperiment: Desirability

In stage four, you and your team incubated and then generated ideas for your customer-centric creative briefs. You harvested them down and crafted the short-list into Idea Canvases. In stage 5a: Experiment, you’ll develop these idea canvases into prototypes to test for customer desirability.

You’ve got a short list of creative ideas that you can be truly excited about, but since stage 2: Discover you’ve been working largely inside your lab in an ‘abstract’ world. Now it’s time to get out into the real ‘concrete’ world and quickly and cheaply test if your target customers are equally excited about these ideas, and whether you have a feasible and viable business model.

Experimentation is a process of continually generating a broad range of hypotheses, prototyping and testing them in small-scale experiments, and feeding the more successful concepts while pruning the failed ones.

In this stage you’ll prove the validity of your ideas by focusing on these four questions, adapted from startup expert Steve Blank:

1. Have we in fact identified a problem/need a customer wants to see solved?
2. Does our solution solve this customer need for a sizeable segment?
3. If so, do we have a viable and feasible business model?
4. Have we learned enough to go and build a business case to get funding for development?

Experimentation will help you successfully:

• prototype and test for desirability, feasibility and viability — the innovation sweet spot
• co-create experimentation ...