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    The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas
    The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas
    The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas

    Written by Michael Schrage

    Narrated by Walter Dixon

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What is the best way for a company to innovate? That's exactly the wrong question. The better question: How can organizations get the maximum possible value from their innovation investments? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. But this book addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. They want fast, frugal, and high impact innovations. They don't just seek superior innovation, they want superior innovators.

    In The Innovator's Hypothesis, innovation expert Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively -- and competitively -- crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. Creativity within constraints -- clear deadlines and clear deliverables -- is what serious innovation cultures do. Schrage introduces the 5X5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. The book describes multiple portfolios of 5X5 experiments drawn from Schrage's advisory work and innovation workshops worldwide. These include financial service approaches for improving customer service and addressing security challenges; a pharmaceutical company's hypotheses for boosting regulatory compliance; and a diaper divisions' efforts to give babies and parents alike better "diapering experiences" with glow-in-the-dark adhesives, diagnostic capability, and bundled wipes.

    Schrage's 5X5 is enterprise innovation gone viral: Successful 5X5s make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateOct 1, 2015
    ISBN9781469063522
    The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas

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    Reviews for The Innovator's Hypothesis

    3.5/5

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    • 2/5
      5X5 framework will certainly not work in most of the industries as the reaource required to allocate this model is not something most of the companies, especially startup or even established companies can arrange.
      Especially in a country like New Zealand where 90% of companies are SMB, this model is highly unlikely to work due to lack of resource.
      Only companies with 100s of employes can even think about this framework
    • 4/5
      Empiricism and the scientific method have had some positive impact on the practice of business. Most people recognize the market as a great external object of study, yet scientific impact on innovation is usually limited and relegated to the domain of hunches by analytic experts. For their part, business schools tend to crank out expert planners and analysts, but do not expressly delve into experimentation. Schrage thinks that is a mistake and writes this book to plead his case that experiments can drive innovation in the business world, much as it does in the sciences.Empiricism as a practice functions as a core historic precept of the scientific method and continues to transform modern life. It simply means that theories/ideas need to be tested against reality for their truthfulness. Few have problems with this idea, and efforts to enact empiricism often expand into building useful and even revolutionary tools to do reality-checks. Even fields like psychology use this lingo in coaching clients how to approach life. Sometimes, humans believe deeply in their ideas, and experiments do not always prove those ideas to be completely correct.Schrage thinks it’s time that the business world embrace such an ethic of experimentation. He, a PhD economist, tires of seeing businesses hide behind the analysis of MBAs instead of running inexpensive (“cheap”) tests to see if the market can bear such a practice. I am no businessperson, but in my field of software development, we often build slow so that we can quickly correct mistakes without misspending tens of thousands of dollars. Indeed, prototypes to test these reality often become the basis of the next innovation. Though no economic or management expert, it certainly makes good sense to me to expand this practice of hypothesis generation to business planning.Of course, the devil is always in the details. The strength of this ethic lies in coming up with good hypotheses, itself an art-form. Many business schools churn out planners, not thinkers and experimenters. Implementing this ethic may require further education in order for such scientific thinking to become prevalent. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that experiments trump analysis, but analysis is more prevalent because it’s easier. Scientific thinking is harder and more disciplined, but Schrage devotes the concluding chapters of this book to developing how this change can transpire. More thought and explanation could help businesses with this task because the potential is high.
    • 5/5
      Michael Schrage provides a methodology for running creative experiments to produce high-impact innovations quickly, simply, and with less expense. This is an innovation process meant for the quick-moving business world of the 21st century. Schrage describes a team process that generates quick results to allow for quick decision making. This is not a process involving surveys and elaborate market research. Schrage’s methodology is about discovering what actually works and what doesn’t. He admits that not all executives are ready to embrace his methodology. The established R&D mindset that embraces elaborate planning and analysis is deeply embedded in organizational thinking. Schrage provides many examples, however, of cutting-edge companies that have adopted the cheap experiment approach and are prospering as a result. Schrage provides an innovation approach for those ready to jettison outdated methodologies and to compete in the 21st century.