In a post-crisis economy, recovery in any business sector is expected to be uneven at best. The goal for business leaders is to prepare the organisation for continuous innovation in products and processes in order to stay ahead - not just of the traditional competitors nipping at your heels, but also disruptors that are poised to roil your market.
Today, it is no longer enough to have a good product at a fair price backed by great customer service. As author Dan Blacharski points1 out, that is just the “cost of entry”. Survival and success in this turbulent environment depends on “constant adaptation and continuous improvement”. And one way to sustain this is to adopt the minimum viable product (MVP) approach to innovation, supported by a technology stack that is geared towards speed and flexibility.
MVP is one of the main steps outlined in Eric Rei’s book The Lean Startup2, which describes a methodology to minimise risk by gathering feedback from customers or users and iterating on it. The approach is applicable to continuous innovation in established enterprises as it is to startups developing their first product. It is as relevant to developing products and services for customers as it is to designing and deploying internal systems that will enable enterprises to quickly reorientate their operations while retaining the quality of user experience that customers and staff expect.
Building an MVP allows innovation teams to test the assumption that customers or users actually want the product or service that is being built, and to monitor their behaviour to find out what they are really thinking.
As Jim Brikman explained in a ycombinator.com blog3, “When you build a product, you make many assumptions. You assume you know what users are looking for, how the design should work, what marketing strategy to use, what architecture will work most efficiently, which monetisation strategy will make it sustainable, and which laws and regulations you have to comply with. No matter how good you are, some of your assumptions will be wrong. The problem is, you don't know which ones.”
The only way to find out is to gather usage data and feedback from customers and users, and to iterate on the features that work whilst discarding the rest.
As the momentum grows, and the MVP progresses to the alpha and then the beta versions and beyond, the product will have to be able to scale rapidly to support more users and customers.
If you did not plan for this from the outset, you are going to find your infrastructure under a lot of pressure. And that is why continuous innovation has to be underpinned by a technology stack that is geared towards speed and flexibility – traits which have come to be associated with the cloud, hybrid networks and software-defined networking.
Cloud services enable businesses to lower the risk of innovation by making resources such as compute power and storage available on demand, whether for product experimentation and rapid iteration, or to scale to meet the demands of business growth. By right-sizing the cloud infrastructure, businesses will be able to optimise these resources for performance and cost as their MVPs morph to full-scale products or services.
Continuous innovation also has to be supported by connectivity that can keep up with the pace of change, lest the network becomes a bottleneck. A hybrid approach to networking, which combines private MPLS lines with the public Internet, is recommended for several reasons. Hybrid networks with multi-path intelligence help optimise performance by allowing traffic to be routed dynamically based on the application, and provide for automatic failover capabilities that make the network more robust⁴. These are critical for a new product or service where the early user experience can determine how much – or little – traction it gains.
A hybrid network approach also enables the business to start making use of software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities to achieve even greater flexibility and agility.
With SDN, network functionality is abstracted from the physical hardware, and the data and control planes are decoupled. What this means is that you will be able to use the centralised control plane to manage the network and set policies at scale.
Network functions such as routers, switches and firewalls can be virtualised, reducing reliance on purpose-built hardware. This allows new functionality to be added and scaled quickly, enabling businesses to roll out innovation rapidly in response to changes in customer requirements or market demand.
In the post-crisis economy, businesses will need to translate ideas quickly into viable processes, products and services in order to stay ahead of the competition. And they will have to do this on a continuous basis to keep up with the pace of change. The MVP approach, backed by a flexible and agile technology stack, is key to ensuring that innovation stays on track and is able to scale effectively as products and services gain traction.
