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Only 25% of all new products that established companies introduce in their markets succeed. The seventy-five percent that fail often do so after multi-million dollar investments and very visible branding and public relations efforts.

So how can companies innovate without wasting resources and risking the company brand? To address this dilemma, Innosight recommends that companies run small, cheap experiments to test assumptions early in what we call an emergent strategy. We recommend that companies "invest a little to learn a lot. A recent Wall Street Journal article provides a great example of this with the experiments that search engine companies run to test their new products.

In the last year, Yahoo has introduced AlltheWeb.com, Google has launched searchmash.com and Microsofts Windows Live unit recently brought MsDewey.com live. These sites were all launched under a separate brand from their parent to test new features and gather consumer feedback.

The site MsDewey.com is a search engine where users pose their query to prerecoreded video clips of a sassy actress.



It is definitely a novel way to search and we can assume that Microsoft has launched this site without the Microsoft brand to answer some of the following questions

- Should we do this?
- Do consumers want this?
- How can we strategically beat competitors?

We like what these companies are doing because these types of experiments

- Can be executed quickly
- Can be executed with relatively minimal investment
- Provide high return on learning investment by providing knowledge around key assumptions
- Present minimal "blowback risk to established brands

The key thing to remember is new products have a high failure rate and one way to minimize the risks involved in launching new products is to run small experiments.

See:"In Search ofBetter Ways to Search: Google, Microsoft, Ask.Com Quietly Use Spinoff Sites To Test New Features, Solicit Feedback,; Pulling Up Videos. The Wall Street Journal. January 17, 2007; Page DI