One of the fundamental errors many would-be innovators make is assuming that the hardest part of innovation is coming up with an idea. That’s actually the easy part. No matter how much work you have done, no matter how careful your analysis, the only thing you can be sure of is that your first idea is wrong in some meaningful way. Ask any venture capitalist or successful entrepreneur. They will tell you the gulf between the first idea and the right idea is often wide. Or listen to the words of the great American philosopher and boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.”
Like it or not, you are going to be punched in the face. So how can you take your punches yet keep standing? One tendency can be to turn innovation into an academic exercise. That is, to develop even richer PowerPoint slides, create more refined financial projections, and develop even finer customer segmentation models. Unfortunately, analysis has sharply diminishing returns, especially when you are targeting new or nascent markets that are notoriously difficult to measure.
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