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Ideas for Impact

Fail Cheaply

November 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

E-Fan X wind tunnel test model (Courtesy: Airbus)

One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.

Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.

Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.

  • Engineers often use surrogate modeling techniques that use simple prototypes and mock-ups that are as representative as possible.
  • Counter to the phrase “it takes money to make money,” shrewd entrepreneurs know how to experiment multiple ways for minimal cost. Next, they scale up one or two experiments that have given them favorable results. The losses are small, and the potential gains much larger.

Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.

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Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Change Management, Creativity, Decision-Making, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Risk, Strategy

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Therese B. Dawson says

    December 30, 2020 at 12:19 PM

    Do things with a smaller failure footprint. So if/when failure happens, it’s not disastrous.

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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