There is no avoiding the fact that innovation often fails. No matter how much love and care we put into our ideas, there are no guarantees our customers will share this same love. Yet ironically, it is this very love for our ideas that’s often one of the main reasons they fail.
When we are wrapped up in love, we can become blind to any evidence that suggests our idea will be anything other than successful. And so, we irrationally persevere. When we finally launch, we find ourselves perplexed when our idea doesn’t receive an ‘iPhone 14’ type response. Not realising, as many great romantics have before us, that our love got in the way of the truth; that our idea simply wasn’t something our customers wanted.
For all those ‘idea loving romantics’ out there, here are five strategies to help ensure you launch ideas that your customers actually want.
1. Fall in love with the customer problem, not the idea
If you need to fall in love with something, invest your emotions in the right place and fall in love with the customer problem. Be warned: This can be tough because we naturally crave the dopamine hit that comes from fixing problems and crossing things off our to-do lists. And our brains also crave certainty which means we strive for resolution as quickly as possible.
Yet, when it comes to innovation, you must fight your innate temptation and spend time understanding (and even falling in love with) the problem. You do this by building customer empathy from the get-go; by getting close to your customers, stepping into their shoes and feeling their pain points.
2. Run experiments
Rather than basing decisions on emotion or gut feel or collecting secondary data with a confirmation bias mindset, take an evidence-led approach to decision-making by running experiments.
Through experimentation, you are forced to base your decisions on the evidence presented in front of you, minimising the risk of subjectivity and bias creeping in. And don’t forget to align on your success metrics before you run your experiments, so you are not left convincing yourself of your promising results.
3. Cut your losses early
The greater our love for our ideas, the more likely we are to fall victim to two innovation enemies: The ‘sunk cost fallacy’ and ‘loss aversion’. The sunk-cost fallacy means the more resources we invest in something, the more inclined we are to blindly persist with it. And then there is our natural tendency to avoid loss and failure. This is because we experience the pain associated with loss twice as intensely as the joy associated with a win.
One strategy to overcome both of these phenomena is to cut your losses early. We’ve all heard the saying ‘fail fast’ when it comes to innovation, the benefits of which are both monetary and psychological. So, have regular checkpoints to decide whether you pivot, persevere, or kill your ideas. Assess the evidence and make data-led decisions.
4. Try micro-funding
Adopting a micro-funding approach means you are not committing all your funds up front on one beloved idea. Instead, you are basing your investment decisions on learnings and evidence and never letting your investment get ahead of your knowledge.
Micro-funding is a method for funding innovation in small increments, where validated learnings are traded for subsequent rounds of funds. Taking this approach means you are placing lots of little bets across a range of ideas. And that you only continue to invest in ideas that show promise through validated learnings from experiments.
5. Adopt a learning mindset
When we are focused on learning, our minds are open to other possibilities. It can even lead to important pivots to our ideas, rather than just blind perseverance.
Another way to keep the focus on learning is to have reward structures in place that encourage learning (and potentially failing), as opposed to performance and success. This is particularly important when you are moving into a new and unknown area for the business.
When it comes to innovation, falling in love with our ideas can lead to repeated heartache, wasted time and money. So, try adopting these five strategies to win over the love of your customers instead.
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