The Innovator's Method

Most new business ideas face two kinds of uncertainty at once: demand uncertainty—whether customers will actually buy—and technological uncertainty—whether an ideal solution can be found. Humans tend to avoid risk, and companies easily fall into inertia, so many new ideas remain just ideas and never get off the ground. In this book, Nathan Furr, a Stanford PhD and professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University, and strategy scholar Jeff Dyer present a management tool called the innovator's method. The method turns loose ideas into projects that can be tested and improved: gain insights from observing customers and from unexpected discoveries; clarify the job customers need to get done; test demand with a minimum awesome product prototype rather than a complete product; before scaling, validate business-model assumptions about price, channels, and cost structure through small-scale experiments; and decide from feedback whether to iterate or make a decisive pivot. Finally, the authors discuss how to scale validated innovations and bring them into the organization's daily management, using tools such as V2MOM. Drawing on the practices of companies including P&G, Amazon, Unilever, AT&T, Citi, Virgin, Kia, Intuit, and Verizon, the book shows how large companies can run innovation experiments without taking huge risks. The authors stress that in an age of uncertainty, leaders are more like chief experimenters: proposing hypotheses with their teams, designing low-cost experiments, and accelerating learning. This is an innovation playbook for both entrepreneurs and established companies.