Today's businesses can profit by Edison s example. When companies skip the experimentation phase, they in effect use the marketplace or their own organizations as a lab. Promising new products and innovative business practices are launched before they're proven seaworthy. No wonder two-thirds of reengineering efforts fail and fewer than 900 of the 16,000 products introduced in 1993 are still on the shelves . People fail to experiment.
Companies make a much costlier mistake when they fail to experiment.
Instead of beta testing the idea in some small part of the organization or market place, they do a full blown implementation. An experiment is a trial run. You should be trying to figure out why reengineering isn't for you, why customers won't want your new portable widget. People fail to get valid feedback. The whole reason for doing an experiment is to get information about your assumptions and hypotheses.