Page 101 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

88 grow from within

Prioritize the uncertainties based on

• Importance of resolution
• Cost to resolve

In your development plan, try to resolve the most critical
uncertainties early on. If the experiments or activities neces-
sary to resolve high-impact uncertainties are too costly in the
beginning, try to break the issue into smaller pieces that can be
tested inexpensively. Engineers do this often. Before deploying
a new satellite into orbit, they’ll rigorously lab test subcompo-
nents. Breaking the uncertainties into smaller, easier-to-test
pieces is typically possible. If it’s not, then it’s okay to postpone
some uncertainty testing, but make sure you don’t defer for too
long any issues that could kill the project. This is the essence
of building a smart, risk-mitigating development plan.

Step 5: Design Simple Experiments and
Build Your Action Plan

For the early stage, keep it simple. Drive as much uncertainty
out of the system with as little resource commitment as possi-
ble. If you prioritize your uncertainties properly, you should
be able to move things along at little cost to the company, sub-
stantially decreasing risk. Risk increases as you spend more
money on a project, so try to resolve the simple, high-value
uncertainties early on.

Step 6: Iterate

If you’re doing things right, this is just the first step. As you
experiment, socialize, gather information, and learn about your
concept, you’ll find that your perspective changes—in fact, that
it changes markedly. We were once involved with a company