Experimentation throughout the product development process - Lessons from food and beverage ventures

Abstract

Established companies turn to new ventures for bolstering exploration activities, but we know relatively little of the product development processes of startups and new ventures and how different stakeholders are utilized in these. The current study investigated the product development activities and experiments of eight Finnish food and beverage ventures in a multiple case study based on 22 interviews. How the developed products fit into the existing portfolio and experience of the ventures seemed to define their enacted development process. Internal experimentation was a constant feature, although the type of experiments varied between different phases of the development process. External-facing experiments were less frequent and more for validation than concept generation. On the other hand, they also carried important market creation functionalities. The results suggest that more nuanced terminology around experimentation would be useful to determine what type of experiments serve different goals in the development process.