Podcast Content

Q. What do you think, what’s the role of experimentation in innovation and how critical it is for an organization?

A. I think it is the lifeblood of actually innovating and I think its the most important part and at times the least utilized area. I have seen that in my experience in the corporate world, there is a way in which the corporate world is constantly budding hands. If you go back to scientific experimentation or scientific method or things like that the goal always is to create a hypothesis and then go prove its wrong. You are focused on proving things that is not true or when you eliminate all the possibilities of it not being true that it actually has the possibility of being true. There is no one who’s the goal at the beginning of the year when they analyze their performance plan or their annual operating plan that your goal this year is to prove that we are wrong about things. Enterprise doesn’t work that way, no one thinks it that way.  So introducing experimentation with the idea of let’s go prove that we are wrong about this. There is a process that I use, I call it evidence mapping. Let’s separate out the things that we know to be true from the things we believe might be true and then our experiments are conducted on the things that might be true in order to prove whether they are or not.  With the goal of saying let’s prove they are not true and if we can’t we got a chance.