Expeditionary Innovation

A proven path to find, validate, and win with solutions only you can deliver

Why So Many Good Ideas Still Fail

If you’ve been in the entrepreneurial world for more than five minutes, you’ve heard the mantra: fail fast. Failing early and cheaply is better than failing late and expensively. But failure shouldn’t be your primary learning strategy.

The primary challenge isn’t failure. It’s uncertainty. You’re operating in a fog because

you don’t know who your real customer is,
what they truly need,
or what solution will make them say “yes.”

Most entrepreneurs try to navigate that fog by guessing. They launch on hunches, pivot when results disappoint, and keep iterating, hoping to bump into the answer by accident. It’s a painful, expensive way to learn.

There is a better way: a process that lets you move forward without pretending you know more than you do — one step at a time, always knowing the next move. You don’t have to love uncertainty to succeed as an entrepreneur; you just have to commit to a process that steadily reduces it.

This book is about that process.

What Expeditionary Innovation Is — and Isn’t

The word expedition comes from the Latin ex (out) and ped (foot) — to stride out, to remove obstacles, to move with purpose. Expeditionary innovation is just that: a journey into the unknown with a clear aim, where each step clears the way for the next. It’s not wandering without a map; it’s advancing into unfamiliar territory with the right tools, the right questions, and the determination to come back with something of value.

Because the term “innovation” gets used for almost everything, it’s worth clarifying what we mean — and what we don’t. Expeditionary innovation is not:

an execution-driven small business that thrives by doing something already known, better or cheaper.
a high-tech arms race aimed at beating incumbents through engineering firepower.
university-led frontier research, extending the frontiers of human knowledge through the work of scientists at the boundaries.

As we see in Table 1, expeditionary innovation is its own creature. It starts with an unknown, unmet need — one that almost always exists — often hidden at the fringes where incumbents don’t look. It’s a need that real people feel every day, but that no one has yet recognized, written down, or started working to solve. It’s about going into the field, surfacing those needs, and designing solutions that serve them so well they can’t help but say “yes.”

That’s why it works for people who don’t think of themselves as especially “creative.” Follow the process and you’ll look like one of the most creative entrepreneurs in the room — not because you guessed right, but because you discovered a need that others missed.

Later in the book, we’ll look at how this same process can lead to big opportunities, even unicorn-scale ones, and why it naturally produces the kind of disruptive innovations that incumbents avoid until it’s too late. But first, you need to see it for what it is: a different category of innovation with its own rules, its own mindset, and its own extraordinary reliability.

Table 1: Typology of innovation categories including **expeditionary innovation** where customer needs are initially unknown

Why This Works So Reliably

Most innovation advice quietly assumes that real opportunities are rare — that creativity depends on lucky sparks or sudden genius. In reality, unmet needs are everywhere.

Markets naturally push companies toward the center. Over time, competitors converge on the largest concentration of mainstream customers, piling features and prices into the same crowded peak. That leaves those at the edges underserved. They adapt with workarounds, compromises, or “good enough” solutions that never truly fit.

These edge customers suffer under what we call the tyranny of the market: they’re visible enough to buy, but not valuable enough for incumbents to design for. Their needs remain invisible in analyst reports, investor decks, and strategy slides. And yet, those unmet needs are where new opportunities live.¹

When you learn to see and serve these overlooked edges, you often enter a space with no direct competition. Because your solution fits “exactly right,” the people you help become your most loyal advocates from the start.

We’ll return to this idea in detail — including a visual of how mainstream competitors cluster and leave the edges underserved — in Figure 2 in the Choosing Your People part.

Finding the Edges

How do you spot these hidden opportunities? By paying attention to signals most companies ignore.

Look for people who don’t fit the mold.

cobbling together multiple products just to make things work,
inventing hacks or awkward routines to get by,
buying “close enough” but never “just right.”

Listen for pain hiding in plain sight:

complaints that keep resurfacing in forums or reviews,
sharp frustrations tucked inside otherwise positive feedback,
stories of delay, confusion, or vulnerability brushed off as “just part of it.”

The temptation will always be to round your idea back toward the middle. Resist it. The fit that feels “too specific” is usually the one that matters most.

From Edge to Innovation: The Triple Diamond Framework

The Expeditionary Innovation process is built around a three-diamond innovation framework — an extended version of the well-known “double diamond” model² — that guides innovators from initial uncertainty to validated opportunity. Each diamond represents a distinct phase of structured work, alternating between divergent exploration and convergent decision-making.

Figure 1: The triple diamond framework for expeditionary innovation. Explore to gain insight, generate informed hypotheses, and test the hypotheses about your people, their needs, and your solution.

Diamond 1: Choose the Right People

Innovation begins not with an idea, but with people.
In this phase, you diverge by exploring a wide range of potential customers or user groups. Using structured criteria, you then converge on one group to study in depth. Finally, you run an access test to confirm you can reach them in meaningful numbers.

This decision is foundational: everything that follows will be shaped by who you choose to serve.

By the end of this diamond, you should have evidence of access to a specific group you can reliably reach and engage.

Figure 2: Choose a target population and validate that you have access

Diamond 2: Understand an Unmet Need

This phase is where exploratory experiments become the engine of discovery.

What Are Exploratory Experiments?

Exploratory experiments are open-ended, discovery-oriented investigations.³ Rather than starting with a fully formed hypothesis, you begin with curiosity and uncertainty — using field observations, conversations, and other immersion methods to find out what you don’t yet know.
They are designed to:

Surface unmet needs that customers may not articulate directly.
Identify patterns and anomalies in customer behavior or context.
Generate new questions and possibilities, rather than simply confirming assumptions.

How They Fit the Process

In Diamond 2, exploratory experiments help you systematically navigate ambiguity:

Diverge: Immerse yourself in the world of your chosen people through ethnographic tools — observation, conversation, shadowing, and reflection.
Converge: Use thematic analysis, persona building, and journey mapping to make sense of what you’ve learned.
Test Early: Form a pain hypothesis — a testable claim about an unmet need — and run a pain validation test to see if the problem is both real and significant.

By the end of this diamond, you should have a validated solution concept and prototype evidence that customers will buy.

Figure 3: Discover an unknown, unmet need and validate that your people have the need

Diamond 3: Build the Right Solution

With a validated problem in hand, you can now move quickly through solution generation and confirmatory testing:

Diverge: Generate a wide range of ideas (aim for 100+ possibilities using rapid ideation tools).
Converge: Apply feasibility filters, dot voting, and scoring matrices to identify the most promising concept.
Stack Confirmatory Tests: Run a progression of tests — desirability, usability, viability — culminating in a smoke test and profit analytics.

Here, confirmatory experiments dominate. Their role is to validate that your chosen solution not only works, but works for the right people, solves the right problem, and is worth building at scale.

By the end of this diamond, you should have a validated solution concept and prototypes that confirm that you can solve customer needs and they will buy it.

Figure 4: Discover an elegant solution to the customer need, verify that you can build it, and validate that customers want it

Why This Sequence Matters

By embedding exploratory experiments in each diamond, Expeditionary Innovation ensures that:

Hypotheses are well-informed before testing begins.
Resources are spent wisely — no building before validation.
Uncertainty becomes opportunity, as early ambiguity drives deeper understanding rather than hasty decision-making.

Conclusion: Begin the Expedition

The journey from edge to evidence isn’t a straight line. With the triple diamond, you can navigate it with purpose, discipline, and confidence — from choosing the right people, to discovering and validating an unmet need, to designing and testing a solution that works.

Follow this process and you’ll create innovations that truly delight your customers. They’ll gladly pay for a solution no one else offers, become loyal advocates, and by addressing a need no one else has spotted, you’ll have a natural window of time to establish your foothold before the rest of the market reacts.

Most importantly, by resisting intuitive but low‑probability methods, you dramatically improve your odds of success. You can mostly eliminate product–market-fit risk — often the dominant risk in startups.

Begin your expedition. Follow the process to create create for your customers and for yourself with confidence from the very first step..

With expeditionary innovation, your solutions naturally fit the pattern of disruptive innovation as defined and popularized by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, with you starting in a niche that incumbents dismiss, then growing into something that reshapes the market.You can read more about these influential concepts in The Innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen 1997) and The Innovator’s Solution (Christensen and Raynor 2003).↩︎
The triple diamond extends the well-known double diamond model popularized by the UK Design Council, which organizes innovation into two cycles of divergence and convergence: defining the problem and developing the solution. Expeditionary innovation adds a first diamond—choosing the right people—because starting with the wrong group undermines the entire process.↩︎
The philosopher of science Ian Hacking (2006) calls this mode of inquiry “adventure” — experiments that precede theory, inviting a guess at what might happen before seeing what will happen. While most experiments in science have historically been confirmatory, exploratory experiments are now recognized as a distinct and essential category (Steinle 1997, 2002; Burian 2007).↩︎