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Most new products fail. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, claims that 95% of the roughly 30,000 new products launched each year fail.
With the staggering number of startups popping up each year, that may not be surprising, but even notable names like Pepsi or Apple have had their share of high-profile failures amidst their string of successful launches.
As companies try to stay ahead of the innovation curve and adopt new technologies to improve their business processes and customer experiences, they need to take all the steps to be sure that they are investing in a product or service that will work well.
The go-to way to do this is with proof-of-concepts (PoCs) because more and more companies are relying on open innovation — collaboration with external vendors — to keep their competitive edge.
Finding the right innovation partners is not always easy, but it is the most effective and efficient way to push your company forward without unnecessarily sacrificing internal R&D resources.
Proof-of-concepts have widespread and far-reaching benefits, but to achieve those benefits, you need a PoC strategy to lead the way.
What is a PoC strategy?
A PoC strategy is your way to manage and encouraging innovation initiatives that are part of your company’s larger corporate innovation strategy.
Every company needs to constantly push toward innovative ways of conducting business and interacting with customers, or they will be left in the dust by their competitors.
PoCs are the best way to minimize risk and maximize reward when taking on a digital transformation, but proof-of-concepts require preparation.
Your strategy gives you and your innovation team guidance to answer key questions for each of your PoCs, such as:
- Which challenges need your attention
- What kind of technology partners to evaluate
- How you want to evaluate them
- How many solutions you want to compare to finally choose the right one, and
- What kind of information you need to make that decision.
Example of Why You Need A PoC Strategy: The Race for AI Tech
In 2018, artificial intelligence and machine learning were everywhere. Businesses scrambled to implement new AI-driven tools meant to make their processes and products run more efficiently.
And in some cases that really worked well.
However, in several notable cases, AI algorithms were fed imperfect data sets, which led to biased results that ultimately skewed the tool’s effectiveness. In many cases, the biases could have been built into the algorithms themselves.
This exemplifies the need for thorough evaluation of AI solutions with a tool that allows you to monitor both the technical capabilities and business impacts of a given technology before implementing it into your production environment.
Why You Should Implement Your PoC Strategy with A PoC Platform
Running proofs-of-concept without a PoC platform can be extremely time consuming and expensive.
Resources that could be providing real value to your business are instead allocated to building environments, developing evaluation tools and frameworks, aligning teams and overcoming bureaucracy.
PoC platforms, on the other hand, allow you to ease the burden of PoCs while still benefiting from the technological leaps and bounds of innovation.
Companies of varying sizes and across industries are using a PoC platform to streamline the process and evaluate several technologies at the same time.
Taking this approach dramatically reduces your necessary time and resource investment in the PoC process, while also taking away the need to begin every PoC process with a blank page.
As your one-stop-shop for configuring, managing and evaluating all of your PoCs, a PoC platform is a central component of any PoC strategy.
It is the single tool that allows you to execute your PoC strategy both at the highest technological level and with the greatest of ease.
How A PoC Strategy Helps You Stay Ahead of the Trends and the Competition
Few things in business are as certain as the need for constant innovation.
Customers and clients are becoming much more technologically savvy, and they demand a level of sophistication that many businesses did not imagine as little as ten years ago.
Proofs-of-concept offer a way to streamline the process and increase the benefits of open innovation so companies can win increased market share.
Maintaining a flexible PoC strategy that allows you to take advantage of technology trends as they become applicable will ensure that your company will remain competitive in the face of stiff competition.
