The Thomke Talks Episode 3: The power of incremental innovation

And aha moments sort of, when when I sort of looked at this online testing actually came by sort of when I when I wrote sort of the article together with Ronnie Cojave at Microsoft, And he shared some examples with me, and and and the example was so powerful in the sense that that it was about incrementalism. And let me kind of take a step back here and kind of explain to you sort of how we usually think about innovation. You know, when you talk about innovation in a, in a, in a executive setting, People often think about this being breakthroughs or disruptions and all these kinds of things. And incremental stuff is always looked down upon, you know, incremental stuff is something that incremental innovators do because there's always been this assumption that incremental innovations or incremental changes is associated with incremental outcomes or incremental sort of productivity changes or anything like that.

Right? But what caught my eye in this example when, when, when, sort of, Microsoft sort of talked about what looked like actually a fairly small change had a huge impact the revenue.

And this is what it's all about. Incremental innovation or incremental changes are no longer in the digital world are no longer about incremental outcomes.

In fact, when you can scale things instantly to ten, fifty, hundred million users.

Even things that are like a one percent improvement or a one percent change or two or three percent change, can have a massive impact on your revenue.

That's what it's all about now. And I think the the rules of innovation are changing as a result of that. So now the game is not about, you know, trying to disrupt everything. The game is now perhaps we can win by doing a lot of incremental things, and the cumulative impact is just as large.

As if you made some disruptive changes to sort of your industry or to your company or whatever. And I think, you know, executives need to pay attention to I refer to this as the experimentation organization.

Turns out the tools have gotten so good. The platforms have gotten so good. That there are no longer the constraints to experiments.

In fact, now you can essentially do it for free.

The constraint now or the bottleneck sort of to doing it now is the organization itself. It's the culture. It's the process. It's the way we manage. So the platform, having the right platform is is really important. And there are essentially two ways you can go.

Either you can build your own internal platform, or you can go to the outside and actually look at company that have a lot of experience, build those platforms and make them available to you, where you can tap into the expertise of people who have been thinking about this a long time the expertise of companies like Optimizely, who have been working with customers for a long time, and took what they've learned and embedded that in the platform. So companies nowadays have choices, but it's really wonderful that they have this third party choice available to them.