Last night the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) put on a great panel discussion on innovation with Marissa Mayer of Google, Tim Brown of IDEO, and Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins. VLAB is a forum for entrepreneurs to connect with each other and investors and discuss how to grow high-tech ventures. For people like me in the marketing field, VLAB meetings and events present a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of future technologies and meet people who are working to create the next big thing.
The theme of the panel was "pivoting to success" through iteration. If success is defined as user acceptance of your product, the idea of iteration is to expose your product early through user testing or beta releases and, in the words of Mayer, "let users tell you where to go." She compared it to sailing, where instead of making a straight line towards your goal, you generally need to tack to the left and right until you get there.
Mayer shared some lucid insights into past Google product launches. With the first release of Google News, a launch postponement gave the team a few extra days, which the team decided would give them enough time to add either search by date or search by location. Since they couldn't agree, they left the decision to user response. The day of launch, they received 300 emails asking for search by date, vs. 3 requesting search by location. While in retrospect search by date now seems a no-brainer, Mayer shared a very sane perspective on product development: "It's innovation, not instant perfection."
The advantage of releasing early and iterating until you've reached the level of acceptance you desire is that you'll tend to stick closer to your desired trajectory. The risk of developing your product behind the curtain, and waiting to release until you feel it's perfect, is that during the interim, you may find out you are very far from what users want, and end up with a dud. Everyone seemed to agree that Apple's culture of keeping products tightly under wraps is the old-school outlier, and their success relies on the uncanny instincts of Steve Jobs.
Randy Komisar stressed the importance of investing in research. He told the story of one company he had invested in who requested $9MM in development funding. Instead, he have them $3MM for prototyping and research. The first round cost $1MM and revealed that users were uninterested in most of the original features except for one. The second $1MM revealed another flawed assumption. Using the last $1MM for a final round, they found their sweet spot and the path to profitability.
When each of the panelists was asked to sum up their points in six words, Komisar seemed to sum it up best: "Investing in iteration immensely improves innovation."
Another attendee has posted a more detailed recap of the discussion. See the interesting blog Womennovation. I suppose one thing to keep in mind is that the panelists for the most part were referring to interactive products, where it is relatively easy to test out pieces and iterate as you go. As Tim Brown pointed out, however, IDEO has mastered the art of rapid prototyping physical products as well. For those of us who work for advertising agencies, the idea of iterating through a campaign launch bumps up against the wall of client acceptance and limited advertising budgets. For clients who can afford test markets, however, this is a viable path.
As a blogger, I took some encouragement from Marissa Mayer's insight, which bears repeating: It's innovation, not immediate perfection. We all want the perfect blog right away, but most of us have to experiment as we go, and see what works.