The allure of certainty is powerful. In fact, uncertainty is one of the strongest fundamental fears most people suffer from.
Businesses often seek to prove that a new idea, product, or service will succeed before they commit resources to launching it. They invest heavily in surveys, focus groups, and predictive models, hoping to eliminate risk and ensure success.
I personally have worked with companies who believed they needed a “statistically relevant” sample size of feedback before making a decision on whether to progress an idea (which in their view meant more than a hundred responses).
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can never prove your innovation will succeed.
No matter how much feedback you gather or how thorough your analysis, success in the real world remains unpredictable.
However, this isn’t a cause for despair. In fact, this inherent uncertainty can be a strategic advantage when approached with the right mindset. By focusing on disproving or invalidating your idea early, rather than trying to prove its success, you can save significant time, money, and effort while increasing your chances of developing something truly impactful.
The Futility of Proof in Innovation
Why is it impossible to prove an innovation will succeed? Because the variables influencing success are outside of your control.
Markets evolve, customer behavior shifts, and competitors adapt. What works in one context may fail in another. Even extensive surveys and data analysis only capture a snapshot of opinions and trends, which may not translate into actual behavior when your idea meets the real world. Often, ideas which the developer loved end up getting almost no interest from customers because it is not solving a problem for them.
Take scientific theories as an analogy. In science, a theory can’t be definitively proven true; it can only withstand repeated attempts to disprove it. For example, Newton’s laws of motion were proven correct for hundreds of years, yet seemed to break down at cosmological scales when more data from telescopes became available. It was only when Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and gravitational spacetime were released that a new explanation was found.
Einstein’s theory of relativity in turn has been validated by countless experiments, but scientists remain open to the possibility that future discoveries might challenge it, especially as it does not seem to combine well with the quantum scales.
The same principle applies to innovation: you can never gather enough evidence to guarantee success, but you can find evidence that indicates whether your idea is flawed or needs refinement.
The Value of Invalidating Ideas
Instead of trying to prove your idea is good, focus on testing whether it’s bad.
This approach, often called “falsification” in scientific terms, helps you identify weaknesses early and adjust course before investing too much.
Here’s how this works in practice:
- Engage with High-Quality Feedback: Instead of relying on hundreds of survey responses, have deep, meaningful conversations with a smaller group of potential customers. Ask probing questions to uncover their real needs, pain points, and willingness to adopt your solution.
- Test Critical Assumptions: Identify the assumptions your idea depends on. For example, do you assume customers will pay a premium for your product? Design a test to validate or invalidate this assumption quickly and cheaply.
- Prototype and Experiment: Build a minimal version of your product or service and observe how potential users interact with it. If they struggle to see the value or solve their problems with it, that’s a signal to revisit your concept.
Why This Approach Saves Time and Money
When you focus on disproving your idea, you’re working to eliminate unviable paths early. This prevents “innovation inertia” or the sunk cost fallacy, the tendency to pour more resources into an idea simply because you’ve already invested heavily in it.
Consider a company developing a new app. If they’re solely focused on proving the app will succeed, they might conduct large-scale surveys to confirm that people like the idea in theory. But liking an idea is different from using it.
If, instead, the company tests a prototype with a few key users and discovers significant usability issues, they can address these problems before launching, potentially avoiding a costly failure.
This is what I teach in my L.I.V.E. (Lean Innovation, Validation & Execution) management framework
Lessons from Science
Science thrives on the principle that no theory is immune to being disproven.
This mindset has driven centuries of progress by encouraging scientists to focus on what could go wrong and adapt accordingly. Innovation requires the same humility. By accepting that failure is not only possible but likely during the early stages, you create space for iterative improvement and eventual success.
Innovation is inherently uncertain, and that’s okay. Rather than trying to prove your idea will work, shift your perspective. Focus on identifying flaws, testing assumptions, and gathering high-quality feedback from the start. This approach doesn’t eliminate risk, but it makes failure less costly and success more likely.
In the end, the goal isn’t to find an idea that’s perfect from the outset. Every idea is born ugly.
It’s to discover an idea that becomes great through careful refinement and real-world validation. By embracing the impossibility of proof, you open the door to a more agile, efficient, and ultimately successful innovation process.
