Innovation is a change in the thought process for doing something, or the useful application of new inventions or discoveries.[1] It may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.

When an innovative idea requires a new business model, or radically redesigns the delivery of value to focus on the customer, a real world experimentation approach increases the chances of market success. New business models and customer experiences can't be tested through traditional market research methods. Pilot programs for new innovations set the path in stone too early thus increasing the costs of failure. On the other hand, the good news is that recent years have seen considerable progress in identifying important key factors/principles or variables that affect the probability of success in innovation. Of course, building successful businesses is such a complicated process, involving subtle interdependencies among so many variables in dynamic systems, that it is unlikely to ever be made perfectly predictable. But the more business can master the variables and experiment, the more they will be able to create new companies, products, processes and services that achieve what they hope to achieve. [1, 2, 3]

[1] McKeown, Max (2008). The Truth About Innovation. London, UK: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0273719122.

[2] Christensen, Clayton (2002). "The Rules of Innovation".Technology Review 105 (5): 32–38.

[3] Thomke, Stefan H. (2003) Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation. Harvard Business School Press. ISBN 1578517508.