Developing Innovations: Pitfall #3
Limiting the development effort to 95% seems feasible!
Oh dear, the third pitfall opens up!
So you avoided the pitfall of a product development with overambitious TRL aspects. You are wisely taking an excellent concept from a totally different industry. You also skirted the second pitfall and kept co-developing suppliers at a distance until you were sure about your technology choices. And now you run the major risk of falling headlong into the third pit. And one of your own making!
All those pitfalls have made you cautious. So you have become careful in spending your money. So you hired a low-cost student and put only one of your own people, part-time, on the project. Almost the worst thing you can do. You never see a ‘slow’ project being successful. Speed is of the essence, this article provides some good insights.
Be careful how you spend your money. Divide your project into smart stages to ensure good de-risking and validating choices. And never be afraid to stop a project that has gone ‘bad’. But really try to avoid starved, anemic projects. This approach will result in achieving nothing, except frustration in your innovation team. Carefully decide on each new stage, do you want to go ahead? If you give it a go, give the project all the resources and people it needs for this stage, and make them move fast. Slow innovation will not get you anywhere. And you will still use or better put, waste the 99.9% effort, but only very slowly.
Wrapping up, be careful how much TRL you are willing to take on, come to technology choices before cooperation too closely with suppliers, and if you give the project a GO, do so wholeheartedly!
For further information
Three pitfalls of developing innovations with winning business models
- Don’t underestimate the 95% of your innovation effort! The first pitfall is right ahead
- Hard at work on the 95% of your development effort. However, the second pitfall looms…
- Limiting the development effort to 95% seems feasible! Oh dear, the third pitfall opens up!
Find more information about developing innovations with winning business models ›
Jeroen de Kempenaer
Value propositions, business modeling, business cases, road mapping, portfolio management
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.