Expeditionary Innovation

An Invitation to Entrepreneurs Seeking a Surer Path to Success

An expedition is a journey made for a specific purpose. Expeditionary innovation is a journey that starts with the purpose of uncovering the unmet needs of customers before developing a solution. This process significantly increases the chances of success by transforming uncertainty into knowledge gained through discovery. In my experience, when entrepreneurs fully embrace this process, it almost always leads to successful innovation.

Focus on Success

Entrepreneurship often emphasizes failure. Informed entrepreneurs know the importance of failing early, failing often, and, most importantly, failing cheaply. In contrast, uninformed entrepreneurs tend to fail slowly and expensively.

This focus on failure comes from the recognition that most startups fail and that successful ones usually iterate through course corrections based on customer feedback. Instead of committing to a full business plan from the start and risking a large investment on an untested idea, entrepreneurs should test their ideas with customers and adapt (pivot) when necessary.¹

Overcome The Challenge of Uncertainty

The logic of “fail fast” stems from dealing with uncertainty. Uncertainty is defined by a lack of knowledge about the actions we can take and the potential outcomes of those actions.² Without this knowledge, failure often seems more likely than success. The numerous decisions that are shrouded in uncertainty in a startup increase the likelihood of failure when faced with uncertainty.

If failure is inevitable, minimizing the cost in money and time becomes crucial. One approach is random search: generating an idea, quickly building a minimum viable product, and testing it with customers. If it fails, iterate with a new idea. While this process might eventually lead to success, the probability of a randomly chosen idea being a good one is extremely low. It could take hundreds or thousands of iterations to find a successful idea, which is not feasible for most entrepreneurs. There are too many stable career paths to justify such extensive failure.

Embrace The Opportunity of Uncertainty

The “fail fast” approach assumes that what is unknown is also unknowable until the right combination of features ultimately aligns the product with customer needs. This perspective underestimates entrepreneurs’ ability to learn and reduce uncertainty through discovery.

We can learn from failure. When an idea is rejected, it often reveals that customers appreciate some aspects while rejecting others. Although the idea as a whole may be flawed, parts of it are valuable. By identifying the features that resonate with customers, we progressively move closer to success through iterative learning.

However, failure is not the only, nor the best, source of learning. We can deliberately learn about customers and their unmet needs before even formulating a product idea. When we thoroughly understand our customers, the solutions we create are more likely to meet their needs and succeed. This book explores the potential of learning before failure.

Expeditionary Innovation

Expeditionary innovation is a process designed to maximize the probability of successful innovation for entrepreneurs. While failing fast is preferable to failing slowly or expensively, it is even better to avoid failure altogether. Uncertainty is a primary cause of startup failure—not only do we lack crucial knowledge, but our instincts often lead us astray.

Expeditionary innovation aims to replace the unknown with the newly known. By drawing on the scientific method, entrepreneurs can confidently cycle between exploratory and confirmatory experiments to target and acquire the knowledge needed for success. These tools enable entrepreneurs to embrace uncertainty and solve problems that others cannot.

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This book is adapted from an earlier book Entrepreneurial Innovation (2018) on the same topic. It is published for the first time here as Expeditionary Innovation with shorter chapters and a more direct process.

This website is free, licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The book is written in Quarto and hosted by Netlify as part of their support of open source software and communities.

Blank, Steve. 2006. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win. San Francisco: CafePress.com.

Blank, Steve, and Bob Dorf. 2012. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. K & S Ranch.

Furr, Nathan, and Paul Ahlstrom. 2011. Nail It Then Scale It: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation. NISI Institute.

Ries, Eric. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business.

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1. A series of books, including Four Steps to the Epiphany (Blank 2006), Nail It Then Scale It (Furr and Ahlstrom 2011), The Lean Startup (Ries 2011), and The Startup Owner’s Manual (Blank and Dorf 2012), highlight the risks of premature commitment to business plans and advocate for a path of failing fast, pivoting, and repeating until finding a fit between the product and the customers. This methodology is now widely known as lean entrepreneurship.

2. Uncertainty differs from risk, though both involve unknown outcomes. With risk, we know the choices (e.g., rolling a die), the possible outcomes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6), and the probabilities (1/6 each). In uncertainty, we lack a complete understanding of the choices and potential results.