During my time at TheCUBE team, I have been able to run several innovation projects for different sectors, always looking to add value and develop solutions that improve people's lives and create new business models for organizations.
For these innovation projects, in our case Radical, at TheCUBE we have developed the Quick & Dirty methodology, which allows us to quickly validate and test our hypotheses with real users, iterate continuously with their feedback, and bring to market services and products that really add value to people.
It is an iterative approach, prioritizing execution and data collection to understand whether the hypotheses we are proposing make sense to the client and which of them can work best.
This methodology is usually developed in 3 phases:
This is the point in the project where we go exploring, looking for data and connections that allow us to understand the context, the industry, the environment and the end user.
The big challenge at this stage is to identify the problem, and this requires understanding the whole context of the project.
We approach research in three phases: an immersion phase with the client to understand their industry, culture, operations and numbers. Then we research and talk to their current and potential users to understand their motivations and frustrations, and finally we analyze economic, technological and social trends to find attractive future scenarios for the project.
At TheCUBE we apply lateral thinking to solve problems and situations in a creative and completely disruptive ways. We do this by analyzing the social trends that motivate people and allow us to understand their needs, the technological trends and opportunities where we can add value to the end experience, and the economic trends that influence the nature of the solution.
Here we also analyze the user, both their processes and their problems, to understand where they are going and to empathize with them in order to design as if we were them.
It's understanding these trends and being able to see them as a whole that allows us to see future scenarios and how we can shape that opportunity to move to the next phase of the process:
Recognizing that we live in an increasingly complex world and that this is reflected in both society and industry, we need to consider many dimensions and not reduce it to a Pain (problems) & Gain (benefits) analysis.
In addition, at TheCUBE we apply the Moonshot Thinking mentality to generate disruptive and ambitious ideas that have never been done before, which is what radical innovation is all about. That's why we need to have the broadest vision possible to understand and validate the hypotheses, which are all the truths or realities we need to test.
In this phase, using different methodologies and tools, together with the rest of the team in charge of the project and the client, we unite the different profiles and points of view to understand what are the potential solutions to these defined problems and steer the project along that path.
It is through these hypotheses that we can understand the risks, or boundary variables, that we must always keep in mind in order to control them so that they do not affect the outcome of the experiment, which is the next step.
This is where we see the most that at TheCUBE no two projects are the same and we treat them all in a unique way. This is where we use all the knowledge from the previous phases to bring a solution to the market.
This experimentation phase mixes a creative part with the creation of a service, and an analytical part where we collect data from the experiments to analyze them and listen to what they really tell us to confirm the hypotheses defined in the previous phase.
In this phase, we validate, through real experimentation, the different levers that trigger the user's interest in order to define the most significant value proposition.
We call this way of doing things Quick & Dirty, which fits perfectly with our motto "Always in Beta". Using this methodology, we quickly build a solution, prototype it, test it, take it out into the street, listen to customer feedback, and keep building until we find the MVBP (Minimum Viable Business Product) that allows us to create and capture value.
The Quick & Dirty approach represents the idea of not being afraid to try. Don't worry about having the perfect product at the perfect time, because that may not happen. It's better to have a product that you think is going to solve a problem, go out and test it with stakeholders, listen to them, learn from them, and iterate as much as you need to.
A clear example of this idea is the case of Meta and his Oculus glasses, which were launched without being a finished product, and still are not. But we know, and Meta knows, that if this product gets out into the streets and into the hands of developers who are interested and hungry for change, they will develop it bit by bit until it becomes a success.
Our advice is: If you want to do something, do it, but if you fail, learn quickly and keep going.
CRISTÓBAL OLMEDO
Radical Innovation Consultant
