The late Clayton Christensen famously highlighted that consumers are not buying our product as much as they are hiring it to complete a particular job. In Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice he argues that the most successful companies are those who are able to understand why customers make the choices they do.
Unfortunately, to use the vernacular of Stephen Haeckel, many innovators adopt a make and sell approach rather than sense and respond. Bunkered away in R&D labs they often fall into the trap of focusing almost exclusively on the technology they’re developing rather than on the customer need it should be meeting.
Co-creating innovation
It’s a problem that INSEAD’s Ben Bensaou can cripple any attempts to innovate successfully. In his latest book, Built to Innovate, he chronicles the Tech Warrior Enterprise event run each year by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
The event is run on a 52-acre training site, with the venue designed to allow all manner of events to be simulated. It’s designed to allow startups to deploy their solutions with real soldiers and get a firsthand view of how their technology could be deployed in a real-world setting.
Alongside the event, the Pentagon operates various CONNECT events each year to provide support to startups and help them ensure that any technologies they develop truly meet the needs of the military. These consultations are usually conducted on a one-to-one basis, but each fall Operation Tech Warrior is run, with the event bringing together engineers, scientists, leaders, and soldiers to a more intensive learning experience. Each team receives an intensive two weeks’ worth of instruction before they’re placed into a range of operational scenarios to give them firsthand experience of how their tech performs in action.
Technical testbed
Telecoms giant Huawei aims to do a similar thing via their private 5G testbed network. The facility, which is located in the Cambridge Science Park in the UK, strives to help bring new ideas and applications to the market.
For instance, the testbed has already been used by London startup Extend Robotics, which aims to allow robotic arms to be controlled in real-time from any location. The low latency of 5G is crucial to ensure that the arms can be operated as efficiently as possible, while the company believes it will reduce hardware and deployment costs by around 30%.
Camnexus is another startup utilizing the platform to test its water management technology that allows for remote industrial operations and the automatic detection of issues in what is often a disparate network of pipes and facilities. The increased bandwidth offered by 5G allows the company to overcome any issues with reliability during peak hours, where up to 30% of information can be lost over 4G networks.
Government as a platform
In Estonia, the government has been using a testbed to allow govtech innovators to work directly with government departments. The Digital Testbed Framework, which allows innovators from around the world to test out their ideas from within the digital government setting. The testbed not only aims to give innovators access to the technological framework but also to the expertise that has helped to create it.
The trade-off is that the government mandates any technologies that emerge from the partnership are open source and therefore free to use. The hope is that the testbed will remove much of the red tape that might otherwise encumber partnering with the government.
“The problem many start-ups face today is that the environment for cooperation the public sector is built on is old, outdated and inflexible and this makes integration and collaboration difficult,” Siim Sikkut, CIO of Estonia, says. “As the saying goes, ‘there’s no need to reinvent the wheel,’ and that’s why we’re inviting anyone and everyone to use the same tech stack we use to run and build our own digital government, for free.”
Getting the right people involved
Testbeds are a crucial tool to allow innovative products and technologies to be tested in a live environment. While involving end-users is hugely important, Bensaou also highlights the importance of involving a variety of people from within the host organization.
For instance, he argues that the creation aspect of innovation is one that is often driven by people working on the front line of the business, so it’s important that they’re involved to give their experience and exposure to the needs of customers and non-customers alike.
He argues there is also a crucial role of integrating new approaches into the operations of a business, and this role can effectively be performed by coaches who operate at the midlevel of the business. These people oversee the evaluation of new ideas and can help to facilitate the connections needed to scale an idea up, whether those are political connections, financial connections, or technical connections. As such, these people are vital to have involved in your testbed.
Lastly, Bensaou advocates for the involvement of senior leaders, who perform a “reframing” role. For these people, the key is to be on top of the trends affecting their industry that may result in a change in strategic direction for their organization. Testbeds can provide a perfect glimpse into the future for them.
Testbeds can be a great way of supporting innovation because they not only help to display innovations in a real-world setting, but also ensure that customers and other key stakeholders are able to participate. It’s through this that innovations are able to successfully evolve and scale. It’s vital that they have this evaluation aspect embedded in the core of their operation, however, as the orchestration of what works is fundamental to the ultimate success of the platform as it drives the intentional learning that is so crucial to experimentation and innovation.
