Which Path: Track 1 or Track 2?
You know the old adage … it goes something like ” build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Its almost the first thing that gets said in every Commercialisation 101 talk that’s ever been heard. …and its normally used to illustrate what not to do in taking a new concept to market.
We at Technologyroadmap.net routinely use a graphic like the one on the left to try and emphasise the merits of investing first in trying to understand more about the market dimensions of a problem before diving in and building a solution based on guesswork by the originator. We talk with clients about the merits of committing funds to a Track 2 approach (market risk reduction) versus a Track 1 approach (technology risk reduction) and why Track 2 is generally preferred.
There is, however, one very clear situation where actually translating your idea into a prototype first actually pays real dividends.
In essence, when building a minimalist solution can be done cost effectively and the purpose is to deploy it with actual customers to see how they respond to the offer – a real experiment is what I mean here.
This type of approach was illustrated very nicely in a recent article on MIT technology review – Trusting Data, Not Intuition. The article describes Amazon and Microsoft experimentation.
So, where you can experiment at low cost and directly with real end users, its actually preferable to conduct the experiment and base your decision on the merits of the idea on the outcome data – not intuition…. evidence-based decision making.
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