The Innovation Triad: Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility—and How Music Playback Evolved

The Innovation Triad For an idea to succeed, it must continually balance three types of risk: customer risk, market risk, and technical risk. IDEO, the well-known design firm, advocates an “innovation triad” that visualizes the three corresponding elements: desirability, viability, and feasibility. You need to put your business model through three stress tests: Desirability: Do customers want your product? Viability: Can you monetize it? Feasibility: Can you build it? An example: the evolution of music playback. When one way of playing music replaces another, the change is not simply about seeking better sound quality. Moving from cassette tapes to CDs did improve sound quality, but moving to MP3s reduced it. Other factors must therefore have been at work. As entrepreneurs, we are responsible for building better products. But what exactly is a “better product”? That is the key question when stress-testing the desirability of an idea. #精益創業實戰 ----- Robin: “Building a product as an entrepreneur is not about developing something that you subjectively consider better; you need to understand customer needs, market needs, and technological developments. The book uses the evolution of music playback as an example. CDs replaced cassettes not just because they sounded better, but because you could select a song directly without fast-forwarding or rewinding. MP3s replaced CDs not because they sounded better, but because consumers could buy an individual song. Finally, online streaming let consumers move from a collection of 100 songs to access to tens of millions of songs at any time. If an entrepreneur keeps pursuing better sound technology and reproduction alone, they may be missing what customers and the market need.” —Verification and attribution note— The post’s tag identifies the source as Ash Maurya’s 精益創業實戰. The “innovation triad” concept is attributed to IDEO; the book passage containing the music example has not been compared word for word.