Corporate innovation pilots are initiated with the aim to experiment and educate. However, the learning component is often lost through the process as teams fixate over delivering results and ensuring the tool, being tested, solves their issues and pain points.

The new focus on results can sometimes twist the experiment. Teams will try to find a new process to be solved by the tool and drop the initial pain point they were focused on. In addition, teams will often ensure the experiment is a success and under value any missing feature or undelivered benefit.

Instead innovation success should be measured on learning KPIs to ensure teams are not afraid to experiment and fail. Big, innovative companies (like Google and Amazon) nail this principle by ensuring failed experiments are celebrated and team members are re-allocated afterwards ensuring lessons learned are leveraged across experiments.

The following are some of the key areas and learnings to be considered during experiments:

STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT

A clear stakeholder mapping will ensure smoother future engagements and timely delivery of key activities (e.g. identification of key and friendly IT stakeholders in big corporations are essential).

INTERNAL SET UP PROCESS

Internal approvals and green light is typically complex and time consuming. Navigating and documenting the process will enable future teams to plan accordingly and engage with the right contacts in a timely manner.

PAIN POINT ASSESSMENT

Documenting the questions and considerations that were missed during the problem statement discussion will strengthen future workshops.

TOOL ASSESSMENT

Understanding and documenting what features were missing or did not deliver the expected outcome will enable a stronger future tool analysis.

It’s worth noting that experiments should not be dragged out if they are not working. Instead, management and the team should be able to stop the experiment, document lessons learned and progress with new innovations without feeling that the experiment was a failure but instead a step toward success.

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