Just found this interesting book from Peter Sims titled Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries.
He provides examples of innovations at Pixar, Procter & Gamble & 3M that originate from small ideas with very low risk. Typically they are cheap to design, develop & test. The advantage of such an approach is that small projects (vs large projects) are not hindered by perfectionism or excessive planning. It’s about constant experimentation, accepting that a lot of experiments will fail. Which is fine. As some of the experiments will grow into something bigger, meaningful and profitable.
Check out the book here.
Edit: just 5 minutes after I posted this, I read this post on grass roots innovation at Microsoft on news.com. The provide the example of the Lync Conversation Translator. An app which allows people who speak different languages to have an instant message conversation in their native tongue. The application prototype was built in an engineer’s spare time …
