Innovation Through Experimentation: A Digital Trait

There seems to be a mystery that hovers around innovation. There are those organizations that lock away a bunch of smart people in a room or a separate unit and expect innovation to occur.  Other organizations hire outside consultants to ignite the innovation fires. Still more organizations try competitive benchmarks to infuse innovation. Personally, I think a great deal of innovation comes from experimentation. Not that these other methods can’t help contribute to the solution, enlightened experimentation is a favorite approach of many a modern organization, and it is growing rapidly. This is particularly important to all of us as we contemplate our journey to becoming masters of the digital age.

In the past, testing was relatively expensive, so companies had to be careful with the number of experimental iterations. Today, however, new technologies such as computer simulation, low code rapid prototyping, big data analytics and cognitive computing allow companies to create better learning more rapidly.  That knowledge can be easily incorporated into more experiments at less expense. Because of the lowered cost of experimentation, a major development project can employ many experiments, all with the same objective: to learn whether the product concept or proposed technical solution holds promise for addressing a new need or problem. The results can then be incorporated into the next round of tests so that the best solution can move forward.

If you want to read more detail on low code approaches leveraged in an experimental way see:

http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/11/18/innovation-through-experimentation/

Additional Reading on Digital:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-is-digital-business.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/11/is-digital-for-everything.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/11/getting-to-situational-business.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/10/selecting-technology-partners-for-your.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2015/10/creating-digital-business-platform.html