Facts Over Opinions

It's always fascinating to watch how a company decides about its future — who decides what, and on what basis. Hierarchy plays a decisive role in who gets to decide. In Business Design, for example, every project has a Project Sponsor who evaluates the results and decides on next steps. But sponsors aren't the only ones making decisions: project Team Members do too, and so do C-Level Managers, especially when it comes to strategic direction and shaping a future vision. We explain all of these roles in more detail in the following chapters.

In short, key Roles in Business Design make different kinds of decisions:

What matters is this: decisions about the future can't rest only on past experience and gut feeling. Experience is the reflected sum of what you've lived through — a look in the rear-view mirror. The most important driver of any decision should be facts: clear and solid. Entrepreneurial gut feeling is then the best friend of facts — it sorts them and fits them into your own business worldview. What counts as a "fact" differs depending on the decision.

When you shape a future vision and strategy, a fact-based starting point can come from what we call inspirational research — we cover this in Step 2: Inspire (Phase I). Exploration happens (Phase II) when we try to conquer new territory in our envisioned future. And finally, in project work around specific ideas (Phase IV), we put our research goggles on again and look deeper into a specific scope of the idea, validating our open assumptions. Always with methods that comply with scientific standards. It's not enough, though, to "validate" a new idea through a handful of selected customer interviews. That's not just bad science — it's dangerous. The statements of those interviewed customers heavily influence whether a company invests serious money in developing a new product or service. If those customers aren't representative, the innovation project will almost certainly fail. And here's the worst part: you won't even know it, because on paper the work looked "customer-centric" — customers were involved in the innovation process. The intention was right; the execution was poor, and that makes it even more misleading. That's why bad research is often worse than no research at all. When you validate a new idea, facts can only come from professional experiments — ones that produce the same results under the same controllable conditions (controllability), when repeated (reproducibility) and even across different researchers (objectivity).

Validating research faces a special challenge when it comes to customers and users. It usually needs large samples — at least 200 people, as heterogeneous as possible. This is quantitative social research. Not every research method can handle samples this large, obviously. Equally important: which data is solid enough for the results to be trusted. In Business Design, we're usually researching the future, not the present. What works best: don't just ask questions and collect opinions on design and features — assess actual behaviour. Are customers or users willing to do something with the new idea, to "invest" something, because they genuinely care about it? In a nutshell, it's important to understand that different "facts" are needed for different steps along the End-to-End Innovation Process. At one point, we look into the future; at another, into the present. At one point, we ask questions; then we test hypotheses. Sometimes we dig deep, sometimes broad. What matters is that we work with methodical precision and don't generate "fake news" — findings that are neither robust nor usable, and that can even blur decision-making.