Imagine that by now you’ve held your successful ideation session, generated a bucket load of ideas and created a shortlist of the top ideas that are going to solve the innovation woes of your organisation. Well done, you. What’s next? Throw the innovation budget at the ideas and see which one sticks? Start designing the end product? Send sketches of the idea to manufacturing? Launch a marketing campaign for the new services? Before investing heavily into each idea, there is one critical step that must be undertaken to minimise the chance of failure and optimise the potential for success and ongoing buy-in and support for your innovation program: test your assumptions.

Why Test Your Assumptions?

A staggering 96% of start-ups fail in search of product-market fit. With more than 70% of IT projects failing and more than 80% of new ideas at large companies failing, a corporate innovation team or R&D department that considers new concepts to take to market is no different to the startup next door. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or corporate intrapreneur, there are proven methods to avoid such disappointing fates. Author and creator of the Lean Canvas, Ash Maurya, says that “the true product of an entrepreneur is not the solution, but a working business model. The real job of an entrepreneur is to systematically de-risk that business model over time.”

In order to de-risk our ideas, we can look to the Lean Startup movement, which uses the scientific method of testing hypotheses (aka the riskiest assumptions, aka the greatest ‘leaps of faith’) to validate or invalidate those assumptions. Identifying the riskiest assumptions early on and testing whether or not they hold true is critical to understanding whether an idea is worth progressing. There is little point in creating a product or service that customers are not interested in, or unwilling to pay for.

‍