Innovator's Playbook

5BExperiment: Feasibility & Viability

In stage 5a you developed idea canvases into prototypes and tested them for customer desirability. In stage 5b, you’ll take the desirable concepts into business modelling to run further experiments for feasibility and viability. The concepts that pass this stress testing for desirability, feasibility and viability are then prioritised for development and commercialisation. Those that didn’t make it are pivoted or perished.

We’ve tested our concepts and identified which ones are to be perished or pivoted and which are the desirable ones that we can progress. Finally, we can jump to expensive and time-consuming business cases, right? Well, wouldn’t you want to use the same Design Thinking methodology to quickly and cheaply prototype and test your concepts for feasibility and viability too? Well, that’s what this next step is about. Helping you identify if:

• there is a sizable market for your solution
• you have a feasible and viable business model
• you have learned enough to go and build such a business case.

And with the advent of Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and the Lean Startup methodology developed and refined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Ash Maurya, to name a few, we now have some great tools for developing, testing and de-risking the feasibility and viability of our ideas at a concept level before we go and invest large amounts of time and money into business cases and actual development.

I’ve seen many organisations ...