Turning Ideas Into Impact: True Innovation Requires Intuition AND Experimentation

January 31, 2012

This is the second post in a series about one process that will help expansion stage companies create massive long-term impact. To read the intro to the series, click here. To read the first post on idea generation, click here.

Last May, Booz & Company released its annual study of the world’s most innovative companies. Not surprisingly, technology behemoths like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Intel all ranked in the top 10.

Now, that’s not news to anyone, right? Of course those companies topped the list.

True. But here’s what I found interesting: Booz & Company researchers Barry Jaruzelski and Cesare R. Mainardi said this about how and why each of those companies are such great innovators in an article for Forbes.com:

“Spending the most on innovation is not how they did it. You can spend all you want on innovation, but you can’t guarantee success (doing it that way). What matters instead? The ability to build the right innovation capabilities to connect with the overall business strategy and other critical capabilities … The most successful companies, we found, are those that focus on a particular, specifically aligned set of common and distinct capabilities that enable them to better execute their chosen strategies.”

Here’s something else the Booz & Company study found: the most innovative companies also follow a very specific, diligent process that prevents intuition or gut feelings from getting in the way of smart implementation.

Which brings me back to this blog series. (click here to see my sketch of the OpenView Impact Funnel; click here to read about why ideas don’t need to be earth shattering to create massive impact) As I wrote in the intro post, innovation is a multi-step process. It’s not created by taking a potentially impactful idea and launching into full-blown execution without any validation of its potential.

That’s why experimentation is such a critical step in turning new ideas into massive long-term impact.

Entrepreneur Anita Campbell backs me up on this point. In an article on OPEN Forum, Campbell says that once top innovators’ concepts enter the development stage, they do two key things:

  • Begin to actively engage with customers to test those ideas.
  • Evaluate the market potential of those new concepts.

Now, it doesn’t matter how simple or complex that idea is. Whether it’s a groundbreaking new technology, a simple product update, or an atypical marketing strategy for their market, innovators always experiment before they implement. Always.

That diligence, as found in this 2009 Harvard Business Review study, is one of biggest reasons the best innovators continue to generate new ideas that result in massive long-term impact. Unlike their less successful counterparts, they don’t let their intuitions, egos or gut feelings make decisions for them.

Now, that doesn’t mean your experimentation has to be brutally scientific and take several months to execute. With OpenView’s newsletter, we tested out a few different templates, played around with subject lines, and tracked the response from our subscribers. The results of each of those tests influenced our next step until we felt like we had something that could gain traction and help us accomplish our goals.

Simple enough, right?

In my next post, I’ll talk a little bit about why ideas mean nothing if you can’t execute them, including some lessons learned from the founding of Facebook. Stay tuned!

SVP Marketing & Sales

<strong>Brian Zimmerman</strong> was a Partner at OpenView from 2006 until 2014. While at OpenView he worked with our portfolio executive teams to deliver the highest impact value-add consulting services, primarily focused on go-to-market strategies. Brian is currently the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at <a href="http://www.5nine.com/">5Nine Software</a>.