Last Friday we could read an interesting blog post by Scott Anthony. It was about four typical innovation pitfalls. Great article, and I like to comment upon it.
The first lie is that you can trust the feedback when asking customers, and instead go for what they do today or if they are ready to spend some money on a new idea (on an early stage). This is a very useful way of verifying the real need and according to my experience also to be combined with testing the market with different versions of the idea, of different markets and different prices will do the job even better. This is also how you build successful e-commerce solutions today.
The second lie is that you will ship in six month which do not happened often according to Scott Anthony which recommend to have a look at Scrum and go for incremental releasing. However, here I have some criticism. Many firms do actually have significant architectural issues due to this approach. Instead, put effort in building a sustainable and scalable architecture and then release increment by increment and in some cases even open up for external innovations as an accelerator of ideas and functionality. The architecture can also be released base upon a quick beta version without any forward-compatible promises and in stage two replaced with a stable long-term architecture where all old components are replaced.
The third lies it that the sales people say of course I can sell that. Could not agree more, no further comments needed.
The fourth lie is that executives are open to everything, they are not when i come to money. Always ask for a budget is Scott Anthony’s recommendation. Good point here, but I would actually give the recommendation to bring a client or customer to the meeting when the executives when presenting the idea.
