Experimenting in terms of starting a business or innovating is much different from the typical experimenting we commonly see in our educational careers. Having a degree in Engineering Physics, I'm very accustom to the traditional experiments, the Physics half of that degree; however I'm also used to the tinkering aspect of experimentation which is emphasized in the book and was certainly part of the Engineering half of my degree. More the three suggested ways of experimenting are as follows:
- Take apart products, process and ideas;
- Build pilots and prototypes;
- Try out new experiences.
The first two bullets above as an engineer really make sense, and is something that I believe every engineer does. However, the new experiences at first seemed out of place. However, when taking a step back, trying something for the first time can certainly be an experiment of sorts. After all we can all remember the first time we did something - all of these first were experiments.
This is type of experimenting is suggested to be done by immersing once self in different cultures, living over seas and learning new seemingly unrelated skills. Of course all of these experiments without great questioning and observing discovery skills would be useless as one would not be able to make the associative connections to form a disruptive idea. There seems to be an implicit inter-connected-ness to all of the discovery skills. I'll chew on that for a while and see if I can expand on that in a later post.
The first part of the second section of the book looked at whether innovation is rewarded. Ultimately if it is not rewarded then few companies would take the risk to actually innovate. Luckily for this class and society, based on the authors research a companies ability to innovate in the future and generate profits on those innovations is rewarded, or speculated upon in the stock price. This is referred to the innovation premium, which is "the proportion of a company's market value that cannot be accounted for from cash flows of its current products and businesses in its current markets". I won't spoil the list for you, but of the top ten companies, I'd bet you'd only guess three. When looking at what was distinct about the companies with a high innovation premium from those with a low premium were the classic: People, Processes and Philosophies (aka culture, but the 3 P's are sexier than the two P's and a C).
In my previous two posts I've neglected to relate them to our project, so going forward I will try to do that. Our project is validating the idea of using 3d printing to create custom replica toys for children. For our project to be successful there would need to be a lot of experiments once the initial ideas are validated with surveys.
Experiments:
- Creating 3d Renders from 2d pictures
- Creating a process to take the render to the printer with no human intervention (save money)
Those two are certainly important, and are deal breakers for our assumed market if they don't work, however there is one experiment that would need to be done before even considering those two.
I would think once we have identified our markets and performed initial tests, we would want to test a human process to see if people use it. That is to have people take photos, through a test application (mobile or web) and then have human create the render. From there the render could be printed using existing 3d printing companies - which are becoming more common for rapid prototyping and then mailed out. Once mailed a feedback survey would need to be used to assess what the customer is happy with and what ht customer is concerned with. From there appropriate pivots can be made based process and product feedback.
