Facts Over Opinions

It's always fascinating to watch how a company decides about its future — who decides what, and on what basis. Hierarchy plays a decisive role in who gets to decide. In Business Design, for example, every project has a Project Sponsor who evaluates the results and decides on next steps. But sponsors aren't the only ones making decisions: project Team Members do too, and so does C-Level Management, especially when it comes to strategic direction and shaping a future vision. We explain all of these roles in more detail in the following chapters.

In short, key Roles in Business Design make different kinds of decisions:

What matters is this: decisions about the future can't rest only on past experience and gut feeling. Experience is the reflected sum of what you've lived through — a look in the rearview mirror. The most important driver of any decision should be facts: clear and solid. Entrepreneurial gut feeling is then the best friend of facts — it sorts them and fits them into your own business worldview. What counts as a "fact" differs depending on the decision.

When you shape a future vision and strategy, a fact-based starting point can come from what we call inspirational research — we cover this in its own chapter. For Project Sponsors, what matters most is that the evaluation of new ideas rests on facts gathered to scientific standards. It's not enough to "validate" a new idea through a handful of selected customer interviews. That's not just bad science — it's dangerous. The statements of those interviewed customers heavily influence whether a company invests serious money in developing a new product or service. If those customers don't represent a representative average, the innovation project will almost certainly fail. And here's the worst part: you won't even know it, because on paper the work looked "customer-centric" — customers were involved in the innovation process. The intention was right; the execution was poor, and that makes it even misleading. That's why bad research is often worse than no research at all. When you validate a new idea, facts can only come from professional experiments — ones that produce the same results under the same controllable conditions (controllability), when repeated (reproducibility), and even across different researchers (objectivity).

Validating research faces a special challenge when it comes to customers and users. Validating customer and user research usually needs large samples — at least 500 people, as heterogeneous as possible. This is quantitative social research. Not every research method can handle samples this large, obviously. Equally important: which data is solid enough to actually trust the results. In Business Design, we're usually researching the future, not the present. What works best: don't just ask questions and collect opinions on design and features — assess actual behavior. Are customers or users willing to do something with the new idea, to "invest" something, because they genuinely care about it? Good, validating customer research therefore asks explicitly about financial, time, or social "investments" when testing whether a new product or service is desirable. In other words: is a customer or user willing to put money down up front (financial investment), recommend the product or service to friends (social investment), or personally join a workshop to help develop it further (time investment)? Some more examples are:

Financial investments

• Pre-ordering products

• Deposit

Time investments

• Invitation to event / next meeting

• Co-creation (Contribution to development)

• Test user for trial version

• Active research on the web

• Dwell time on webpage

• Registration for newsletter / event / training

Social investments

• Introduction to colleagues or friends

• Recommendation

• Testimonial

• Exceptional emotions

Another option: release the new product or service (prototype) to customers and users under conditions as realistic as possible, so you can observe their behavior around it. We look for reality when we generate facts — we don't rely on the individual opinions of managers, employees, or customers. Here too, we're talking about a time investment.

The investment you ask for depends on you, your hypothesis and experiment, your prototype / Lean Offerings, and your customers and users. The higher the level of investment you're looking for, the more reality is needed. While planning your experiments, consider the level of reality / evidence. Some examples:

F = Financial investment | T= Time investment | S = Social investment