Sorry for the delay in responding. This is a great question. Interestingly, I feel that the Build It, Try It, Fix It (BTF) approach works even better for new/new situations.

Look at it this way. With incremental innovation, you know who your customers are. If you wanted, you could analyze the marketplace with reasonable accuracy to understand if a new product or service will succeed. Customer insight and data analysis tools can measure the behaviors of your existing customers with reasonable accuracy.

Same holds true, as you point out with certain technologies – especially web-based technologies where change is easy.

But in the new/new situation, your target audience may not be clearly identified. And even if it is, you may not have access to that market to get insight. Get accurate data may be nearly impossible. Therefore, the best thing to do is think creatively about how to create an experiment that will help shake out the marketplace.

Maybe this isn’t the best example, but I like what Starwood Hotels did when the introduced aLoft, a new hotel chain. As a way of getting feedback from the largest group of people, the created a virtual hotel in Second Life. This gave them greater access to a wider group of people than those who are current Starwood customers. Theoretically, this idea could be applied to any new concept.

The key is to think of these not as prototypes, but rather experiments. The objective is not to success or fail, but rather to gain real-world insights into customer behaviors. And this requires a lot of creative thinking. Put as much creativity energy into think through your experiments as you do in developing the idea you want to test out.

Let me know if there is something else you had in mind.

I liked the article and agree fully with the principles and advantages described. Thank you!

My question is; in what circumstances is this process most effective?

I can see its benefit more when considering incremental-type innovations where the application, market and customer base are known and one wants to be sure the innovation will work as anticipated – i.e. the risk is relatively low. I also see a benefit for new technology development in a known market eg. palm pilot development.

But what about its relevance for “new/new” situations.

I have a hard time convincing companies to spend less time trying to “guess” the potential of a yet-to-emerge market and spend more time doing exactly what you perscribe – get something out there and learn for yourself – how the market will react and how fast it might develop. Any insights on how this process reduces risk of uncertainty and how it might help predict business success?

I hope many article and other, writing about IT, also, system development. More power to you!
Thank you…..!

By just going out to do what we felt right we have discovered our purpose and methods far better than any strategy session good have taught us.

With the little bits of wisdom your newsletter has given me, and the confidence in my ability to learn while doing, I have been able to lead the team to a successful start-up and we look forward to bigger things in the future.

Build it, try it, fix it works for me, always has …. but I had to learn to quit it when things can’t be fixed or just don’t fit personally.