Thought Experiment #18: Experimentation platforms

How do you measure the level of 'innovation' happening inside an organisation, be it a startup or a multinational?

In our view, it can boil down to tracking and constantly improving the answer to one question "Which experiments have been executed, killed off or scaled - this week, month or quarter?"

What separates the really innovative companies (Netflix, AirBnB, and Amazon) from the laggards, is not how many ideas in their ideation platform, but the frequency with which they run experiments at all levels in the organisation. Although Netflix has an experiment platform at the product-level, in this blog we argue the need an experimentation platform at the job-level.

Everyone's job, whether it is CEO or middle-manager, contains a varying degree of 'searching' for what works and what doesn't, versus 'executing' known paths that do work or are known to add value. Before we look at experimentation, let's take a quick look at what is wrong with some ideation platforms:

In the search for ideation platforms, we came across a few that described themselves as "Collect ideas from your employees, give them a place to vote, the most important ideas bubble to the top."

Let's dissect some of the keywords:

• "collect". Does the company need yet another repository of content that doesn't fit in the natural flow of someone's day job?
• "ideas". Are we really short of ideas or short of action, or reaction once we have learned something new?
• "give them". Do employees need a fake power of a web-form which they 'fill in' or the knowledge, skills, mindsets, resources, relationships, and permissions to execute small on their idea?
• "vote". Innovation is never democratic. How can other people judge which ideas to back when the ideas themselves are going to change when in execution (the best ideas always do)?

We argue that people inside organisations don't need an ideation platform, rather they need an experimentation platform:

• one-page: The focus is not on documentation or a box-filling exercise. A one-page approach that helps any employee to quickly design and run an experiment.
• experiment: Let's stop calling it innovation. It is only an innovation in hindsight when it has created value for you, your customers or the ecosystem. Every innovation begins life as an experiment. It is also much easier to kill off if you call it an experiment versus an innovation project.
• platform: A platform, that is not just a website, but one that brings together small amounts of money, resources, relationships, training, and permissions at the experiment level.
• stakeholders: The crowd's role should not be limited to ideation. The crowd's role (from employees, customers, partners, etc) only moves from being a transactional one to a relationship driven one when it is centred on the execution of the experiment.
• problems: It is the management's job to take the strategy and break it down, not in terms of ideas or challenges, but real problems that need solving for. The portfolio of problems you choose (from the product level to the business model level) translates into a portfolio of experiments you want to see happening inside your organisation. Of course, this is not easily done - management needs a way to see problems, quantify them, create the urgency around each one and communicate them.
• tracking: It is everyone's job to be able to track the progress of their own experiments, to share their learning, to communicate the bottlenecks, and what needs to change in the here and now - not what happened 2 months ago. Finance departments love business cases that are based on real numbers, that can demonstrate a good return on investment and if the experiment was measured then you’re on to a real winner.
• improving: Tracking is a means to an end. The goal should be the speed of decision making - from killing off experiments, iterating on those that don't work as intended or investing further resources in scaling the ones that do work.
• their: We firmly believe you cannot (read: should not) separate the ideas and the people behind them. By 'their' we mean both the person(s) whose idea it is and the sponsors. You need people to fight for their hypotheses, and that is more likely to happen if they own their own experiments.
• every week: The experimentation platform is not yet-another-website that employees visit once a month, but integrated into every job profile and performance review system. It's there to help every employee get their job done faster, easier, or better every week.

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Experimentation platforms are not a panacea, but it is one answer to the challenge of delivering value for ourselves, our companies, our customers, and the wider ecosystem. Rather than talk about a subjective notion of innovation, let's get objective with experiments across all parts of our organisations.

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Call to Action:

We are currently in the 'alpha' phase of developing this experimentation platform. If you'd like more information, please email: zevae@co-create.org