“Failing fast” has become a popular mantra in innovation circles, but, of course, the idea isn’t to fail but rather to learn. As such, pilot projects are only as good as your ability to learn from them.
This requires that you have not only a hypothesis to test and a means of objectively testing it, but also a commitment to do something with the results at the end. This could be to scrap the project entirely, it could be a slight pivot in a new direction, or it could be scaling it up.
Working backward
Too often, pilots lack this commitment to action at the end, which means that any learning that results from the pilot is wasted. A good approach to avoid this is the “working backward” method popularized by Amazon.
This approach requires the team to imagine that the innovation is actually ready to ship. They produce a press release announcing the launch of the new product to its potential customers.
This process forces the project team to consider what a successful outcome looks like and what might be required to achieve that outcome. This will help you to identify the budget needed to scale a successful project, who might be required to work on the project, what political constraints exist that could hamper growth, and any other possible issues that will need to be addressed if the lessons from the pilot are to actually be learned.
Often innovators wait until their pilot has been conducted before they start engaging in these thoughts and discussions, during which they try and elicit the support they need, whether from investors or company insiders, to scale up their project accordingly. This greatly increases the chances of the pilot going nowhere as it becomes easy for sponsors to park the results in the “nice to know” pile while continuing with business as usual.
A staged process
This is not to say, of course, that projects will automatically go from successful pilot to market with nothing in between. In reality, a successful pilot is usually the sign for more testing to be done. For instance, your project may have succumbed to the Hawthorne Effect, or it may have contained a hidden parameter that you weren’t aware of during your testing.
Those are inevitable challenges to consider, but by working backward you do at least examine the kind of factors that will underpin any successful scaling. The concept of working backward also ensures at the earliest opportunity that you consider the customer and the problems that you’re striving to solve for them.
As well as considering internal factors in your “press release”, you also examine the customer’s problem, how your solution can solve that problem, and the scale of the benefit in comparison to the current method used by the customer.
Three things needed to scale
In Corporate Explorer, Stanford’s Charles O’Reilly and colleagues describe the various considerations that organizations need to have when exploring how successful ideas might scale. These are crucial considerations as it’s far too common for teams to focus far more on the ideation stage of the project than the execution and scaling stage. They outline three assets in particular that teams need:
- Customers – this revolves around having access to channels and customers so that your project can achieve the market reach needed to achieve its goals.
- Capabilities – this involves having the technologies, products, skills, and business models to actually deliver the value proposition.
- Capacity – this includes the ability to manage the project when it achieves scale, and so includes things like logistics, manufacturing, customer service, and fulfillment.
“There are different ways to meet these needs,” the authors write. “Can the venture build it themselves; can it leverage the assets of the core business; can it acquire from outside the firm or partner with others to gain access to what they need.”
While thinking backwards from a “successful” outcome is no guarantee that your pilot will scale successfully, it will at least ensure that you have considered the various factors required for it to do so before you get to the point of needing them.
