The second insight for entrepreneurs, is that you make dozens or even hundreds,
of small innovation decisions within the context of your new venture.
Anyone of those problems can itself be viewed as a small tournament,
let me give you a few examples.
This is the Oral-B cross action toothbrush, the handle designed for
the cross action was developed by the design firm Lunar Design.
And you might look at this toothbrush and
say, wow, they had a brilliant designer who came up with that idea of a soft and
hard material molded together, in that ergonomic form.
But the reality is,
that Lunar Design considered hundreds of different handle designs.
And they then developed several dozen of those handle designs
into foam models that could be tested and held in the hand.
And then they took the best five of those and they made models
with the production-intent plastics and then gave them to consumers.
And then they picked the best of those five to eventually become
the Oral-B Cross Action product.
And so, even in a small decision like, what should the shape of this toothbrush
handle be, you can use a tournament logic in order to explore
many different alternatives and select only the one that offers the most promise.
In another example from a company that I co-founded,
we applied the tournament logic to the development
even of a simple question like what should the graphic identity be.
Here shown are several dozen of the original graphic
concepts that we considered.
The best seven that we thought offered the most promise, and then the final
one that was developed from those seven to be the final graphic identity,
which is in fact the graphic identity of what is a successful company today.
And the third example shown here, is the development of a name for
a small company I co-founded called Xpult.
The Xpult is a kit that's sold to school teachers to teach design of experiments,
a form of statistical analysis.
When we were trying to consider what to name the company and
what to name the product, we developed a couple of dozen initial concepts,
from that selected the best 10, then tested those 10 to identify the best
three, and then finally selected the final name based on testing with consumers.
So even in a decision as small what should we call the product,
you can apply this tournament logic in order to identify the best opportunity,
the exceptional opportunity, the one that's going to best serve you.