Piloting: Bringing Disruptive Innovation to the Market

The pilot will allow us to validate some of our core assumptions, optimize customer experience, and define key attributes of the value propositions. As such, they are based on five main considerations: 

1/ Explore and learn: Bringing disruptive innovations to the market should not follow a traditional linear (stage-gate) product development approach. It is advisable to approach the market with iterative versions of increasing functionality to capture early feedback, refine the value proposition, and minimize risks. As a result, we created our open pilot program to engage with core users where we will be able to test and validate different hypotheses, capture new learnings, and unlock meaningful insights to iterate our products and services rapidly.

 2/ Set realistic expectations: While we wish that the pilots would answer all questions and our product would have all the functionalities,  we have to be realistic and set  expectations. A pilot is  simply a method to test hypotheses in a particular context, with an actual group of users, and within a specific time period. Thus, prior to starting the testing, we clearly communicated to all the stakeholders our expectations of what could be and could not be achieved with this pilot. It will be a great learning experience that will help us understand better our end users and further develop our product and its performance.

3/ Start with a clear hypothesis: Piloting should never be the first round of exploration. It is recommended to start with faster and cheaper methodologies to build and refine the value proposition. At Kamleon, before the pilots, we conducted five rounds of research leveraging design thinking capabilities such as customer discovery workshops or user interviews using animated videos. This allowed us to clearly set the hypothesis we wanted to validate during our pilots with elite athletes.

4/ Build real experiences: Pilots are not theoretical research methods such as many others available; rather, pilots provide users with an in-context real experience. At Kamleon we partnered with the French Olympic Training Center located in CREPS Font Romeu to implement the most functional real version of the product in the day-to-day practices of 50 elite athletes preparing for the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games. The athletes, coaches and other applied science professionals used the urinals integrated in their daily lives and in a realistic way.

5/ Be iterative and open to change: During the pilot, especially when pioneering the development of products that have not yet been created, it is common to discover many unexpected insights that may affect the development roadmap. At Kamleon, we approach pilots with a very open and flexible mindset, as they provide us with as much learning as possible to rapidly implement and eventually build value propositions that make our products truly unique.

For more information, you can send a direct message to info@kamleon.com