Expeditionary Innovation

Preface

An invitation to entrepreneurs and innovators to stop guessing, stop failing, and confidently, reliably succeed through innovation

How to Reduce Uncertainty and Raise Your Odds of Success through Innovation

Entrepreneurship is thrilling—but it’s also uncertain. When you’re building something new, you’re often missing the very knowledge needed to make good decisions. Most innovation advice tells you to embrace this uncertainty or fail your way through it. But guessing isn’t a strategy, and failure is a costly teacher.

This book offers another way.

Expeditionary innovation is a structured method for reducing uncertainty, discovering unmet needs, and increasing your chances of success—deliberately. It replaces intuition with insight, guessing with grounded learning, and paralysis with practical next steps.

Why Do So Many Innovations Fail?

You’ve probably heard the advice: fail fast. It’s not wrong — failing early and cheaply is far better than failing late and expensively. But failure shouldn’t be your primary learning strategy.

The real problem in most startups is uncertainty. Who is the right customer? What do they actually need? What solution will really work? When those questions go unanswered, entrepreneurs default to guessing — and that’s why most fail. They gamble when they could have learned. They chase markets they don’t understand. And worst of all, they often start with a solution rather than a need.

Some try to escape uncertainty through rapid iteration: launch, test, pivot, repeat. But the odds of stumbling into a good answer this way are painfully low. If you’re doing something this difficult, you deserve a better process — one that helps you learn before you launch.

The Emotional Weight of Uncertainty

Uncertainty isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a human one.

We crave closure. We want answers. And when we don’t have them, we tend to fall back on gut instinct, bias, or premature conclusions. That’s why entrepreneurs often cling to their first idea—because uncertainty hurts.

Expeditionary innovation offers relief. It won’t give you instant answers, but it will give you a path. You don’t have to know the destination. You just need to trust a method that lets you discover what others overlook. You’ll know what to do next—and why it matters.

The Expeditionary Method and the Triple Diamond Framework

At the heart of this book is the expeditionary method: a repeatable process of forming hypotheses, running exploratory experiments, gathering real-world evidence, and refining what you know. This isn’t lean iteration or agile reaction. It’s disciplined discovery.

You’ll apply this method inside the triple diamond framework, which maps out where your efforts go:

  1. Diamond 1: Choose the Right People
    Innovation doesn’t begin with an idea—it begins with someone whose life could be better. You’ll identify and access a group with unmet needs.

  2. Diamond 2: Understand an Unmet Need
    Through observation, conversation, and analysis, you’ll uncover a meaningful pain worth solving. You’ll validate it before you try to fix it.

  3. Diamond 3: Build the Right Solution
    You’ll generate a wide range of ideas, filter them intelligently, and test the best one for desirability, usability, and viability—culminating in a validated solution ready to launch or scale.

Each diamond is a cycle of divergence, convergence, and validation. Each test gives you knowledge instead of assumptions. And each step is one you can take with confidence.

What This Book Offers

If you’ve ever felt like innovation is just a game of high-stakes guessing, this book will change how you work. It gives you a proven way to move from uncertainty to clarity—and to do it with confidence.

  • A rigorous, repeatable process for reducing uncertainty
  • A framework for uncovering and validating unmet needs
  • Practical tools for testing ideas without gambling resources
  • A mindset shift—from guessing to discovering

You’ll finish with the skills to lead innovation with clarity, evidence, and integrity—even in situations that once felt impossible to navigate.

This book is written by Nile Hatch and is adapted from an earlier version, Entrepreneurial Innovation (2018).

This site is free to access, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, and made possible through Quarto and Netlify’s support of open innovation.