Ideate and Validate – the pulse of innovation
Innovation, in essence, is about dealing with uncertainty. You venture out into unknown territory, in search of unearthed customer problems. To find new opportunities for value creation. Without knowing whether people actually desire your product or service, if the solution can be built and will work as you envision, or whether it all will make sense from a business perspective.
Like scientific discovery, progress is made by constantly moving back and forth between ideas and empirical evidence. Unfortunately, many companies still rely too much on ideas alone, without sufficient validation of whether the idea is actually desirable, feasible, and viable, or has a positive impact on the world. They spend months or years of internal workshops and under the radar product development, eventually leading up to a final product release. At which point the market will finally tell them if there actually is a need for it. It’s a bit like holding hands, jumping off the cliff and hoping for the best. A very risky and often ineffective strategy.
Ideate and Validate
An experiment driven approach to innovation ensures company’s develop solutions people actually need, at minimum risk. At Innoboost we call this Ideate and Validate; the iterative process of continuously (in)validating assumptions through experimentation and user testing. Throughout all stages of innovation. From early problem exploration and determining whether you are looking into a meaningful issue for customers. To ideating and validating ideas for solutions, and developing the technology. To determine willingness to pay, price points, and the right business model. And all the way to go-to-market strategy, branding and continuous improvement.
So how does it work? First, determine what you need to test. What is the risk or opportunity you are looking into, and what stage of the innovation funnel are you? Then, you ideate (problem statements, solutions, business models, etc.) and list your assumptions. Prioritize them and turn them into hypotheses (with clear metrics) to be tested. Next, you pick and design the right experiments or prototypes to (in)validate your assumptions with real customers, users or market experts. Based on the outcomes, you either persevere and build further on the new insights, pivot or kill the whole thing altogether. As such, you make data-driven progress without stacking risk.
Overnight validation. At Innoboost we can help you ideate and validate in every stage of innovation. Without big upfront investments. Our proprietary 150.000 user-base customer panel allows for extremely fast and targeted user validation within a matter of hours. Small steps can make big wins
Want to learn more on how Innoboost can help you Ideate and Validate, fast? Contact us today.