MIT课程：市场实验在战略执行中的关键作用

The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER: Last week, we started talking about execution in the marketplace, and we talked about e-business and how a major part of what we did in IBM to help formulate a strategy that we could execute was to leverage our base, which included base of talent, the base of clients, existing products with the new stuff.

And that the way we framed it, and it was a very good framing, I think. Well, it turned out to be pretty successful in the marketplace, is for IBM, the internet, World Wide Web, and e-business meant leverage the internet to make what you have that much more valuable. And that's our framing. Other people would have framed it different, saying, what you have goes away, get rid of it. That's a fine way to frame it. You have to convince your customers.

And we talked about some of the key aspects of organizing this strategy, the market strategy, which is balance between proprietary and open, in-house versus partnerships. What are going to be your key offerings? How are you going to measure your progress? And those are very key organizational things. But we also talked about a very important subject, that when you're talking about a disruptive technology, like the internet, with a very big potential market-- and remember, we talked about the goddamn internet is just this incredible system.

And as you know, if somebody said, well, where in this stack does the internet play? What makes it so disruptive is that it plays up and down. The more you go across, how do you focus your efforts? If you have something that complicated, if you just said, well, I want to go take on the world and I want to go and transform applications, no, no. Take it easy. We may get there. But the first question is, what are you going to do first?

How do you get to first base? You know what I'm talking about. Let's get there one step at a time. And we will talk today about customer-based experimentation. And first, I'll talk about the work of Tom Key. And then we'll talk about Eric von Hippel's work. And Eric was really nice in saying he'll join us at 2:00 o'clock, which is wonderful, because he will then join us in the discussions. I can't say enough about experimenting in the marketplace as a way to figure out what to do.

If you're just doing pure technology invention, clearly you do that in the lab, and clearly you experiment in the lab. And if you're doing products, you would clearly prototype-build, et cetera. But innovation, especially now, more and more, and what we're talking about in this class, is how do you take stuff from the lab or from somebody's lab-- don't have to be your lab. Could be MIT's lab, Stanford labs, anybody's labs-- take it into the marketplace?

Now, the marketplace is a wonderful concept, but it's a cosmic concept. So you need to start narrowing down, what the hell do you mean by the marketplace? In other words, you have to tell me where is first base, so that we know where you're heading. And a critical part of finding first base is marketplace experimentation. Working very, very closely with clients. Now, in the past, marketplace experimentation was just too expensive.

There was very difficult to do. First, it was very difficult to build anything in the lab, then to build a prototype. Remember, most of the channels to market, most of the dealings with clients-- not most, all of them were people oriented. There was no technology to help us do that. So it was just very expensive. So you had to be very careful. And often, the market experimentation was another way of you announce your product and you hope and pray the marketplace likes it, or your service.

But this is changing. Companies now have an opportunity to innovate and experiment in a whole new way. What are some of the things companies can do to experiment? Well, here is a long list. First, there is the internet itself, which as you know, is the world's biggest platform for innovation, experimentation, and collaboration. Then is the fact that IT systems are so inexpensive. I don't know if you know, but the amount of money that, let's say, brand-new ventures need to get going now is significantly less than during the dot com days.

And a big part of that is that during the dot com days, in order to get computers, they needed to buy all this stuff, and that stuff was much, much more expensive. Today, computers, much to the chagrin of companies like IBM, are dirt cheap. And especially to get going-- and you can get software for practically nothing if you use LEMP and LAMP, and other open source stacks. So the cost of getting going is much less expensive.

Even supercomputing, which before you had-- it was very expensive to access. You can do that much better. And on and on and on. So there is a whole set of new tools that very much enable you to experiment. And Tom Key makes the point that companies need to take that into account the opportunity for experimentation in their basic structure. That is, it's not like I go with the way I've been doing it for the last 50 years, and I'll bolt experimentation at the end.

That's not the right way to do that. He makes the point that you want, from the beginning, to organize your efforts in terms of extensive experimentation. What is an example? Well, if you have a huge team that needs to do something for production, which maybe is what you need, maybe you want to have a small black belt team that does a rapid prototype that you can even start making available as an alpha or a testbed to start testing out the ideas, and then incrementally refine what you build so that you can start experimenting very quickly.

I have to tell you, in the old days, people could bring, say at IBM and other companies, product plans that may have taken, I don't know, three to five years. Today, a plan that three to five years-- it's not that it would be a joke. And if you're building a new semiconductor fab, that's a reasonable plan because you're building a semiconductor fab. But let me tell you, if you're building a software product or an application or a new service, three years, it's ridiculous.

The market will have changed several times. So you have to think what you plan to do. I advise people, tell me what you can get done in six months. Well, I need-- no, no. I know you need more time, but what can you get done in six months? And then do that quickly. And then six months after that, and six months after that, you keep iterating. So it really changes the whole way you look at what you're building. It doesn't work in every case.

I don't mean this is universal, but I'd be very worried if somebody says, Irving, it's three years or nothing. I'd be very, very worried. Please. AUDIENCE: What you're just describing, it seems pretty obvious in the IT and software industries. How universal is it? IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER: Well, let me ask you, who have experience in other industries, drug research in pharmaceutical? There's a lot of work about testing new pharmaceuticals much, much faster with all kinds of new technologies.

Do you all want to talk about your experience in your industries? AUDIENCE: In the drug industry, hand skills are to get out the drug are very-- the product plan would be something at least 10 years ahead, but the emphasis today is on failing really fast. And I don't know if this is connected with how fast we learn. But it seems like if you iterate and you iteration fail and takes three years, you tend to forget as an organization, what drove your iteration.

Whereas if it's about six months or three months, you tend to keep that-- IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER: That's my feeling. And are pharmaceuticals making progress in doing that? AUDIENCE: They're trying. How

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