Small businesses, good experiments: turning ideas into viable offerings

Do not test the whole idea at once

Between a convincing idea and a workable offering lie several different questions. One concerns actual demand, another practical implementation, and a third a clearly understood scope of service. Anyone who tests everything at once often ends up unsure what prompted approval or rejection. With its IdeenTriebwerk, Fraunhofer IEM describes a development approach in which business and solution concepts are tried out with little effort. Small businesses can derive a manageable process from this: first, formulate an assumption, then create an opportunity to make a relevant observation. For a new design service, this might be a discussion based on a sample proposal. The aim is not to generate enthusiasm at this stage, but to uncover uncertainties as early as possible and prepare for the next decision.

A prototype must answer questions

A prototype can be a sketch, a process plan, a sample piece or a simple description of a service. What matters is not its technical sophistication, but its suitability for the question at hand. If the aim is to test comprehensibility, a sheet outlining the offering may be enough. If the question is whether something can be made, a practical production trial is needed. Price must also come into it at some point: the Munich Chamber of Commerce and Industry stresses that pricing calculations should take account of costs, market conditions and the value of the service. A trial offering without a realistic scope of service can therefore give a misleading impression. If participants receive unusually time-consuming, personalised support, their satisfaction says little about subsequent routine operations. It helps to explicitly document the work involved and any exceptions during the trial, then assess them objectively together afterwards.

Turn feedback into decisions

Not every positive response justifies expansion. People may like an idea without going on to use it. Specific enquiries, plausible usage situations and recurring obstacles are more revealing. A simple evaluation framework therefore separates observation, interpretation and the next action. An observation might be that several people understand the scope of delivery differently. The interpretation could be that the description is unclear; the next action would then be a revised presentation rather than an immediate expansion of the range. Criteria for stopping are equally important. An experiment is allowed to show that an idea does not fit the existing conditions. Such results are not a creative failure, but a way of limiting unnecessary work. This creates a development practice that allows curiosity while respecting the limited capacity of small businesses.

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