Friday, November 09, 2012

Small Batch Madness

Interesting article in today's Coloradoan on craft brewing and "the big rise in thinking small." Much attention in the social sector is on "getting to scale" and entrepreneurs are told not to bother if they aren't  going to reach 1-10-100 million people.

I first learned about diseconomies of scale from Jill Bamburg, and one such diseconomy may be the inability to do rapid, low cost experiments. Which seems pretty important to be able to do. Hard to figure out how you'd do an MVP* of a new beer without actually making it and tasting it, right?

This ability to do small batches, as the article points out, also allows you to preserve and pursue the crazy and the mildly mad. And as Aristotle said, "no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness."

So if you want to be innovative, do small batches and small bets. And be a madass. It's good for your soul.
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*minimum viable product (lean startup jargon for a basic prototype or experiment).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Excellent. The reality is that the first stage is different than execution. We have scads of help on the execution side, but most accelerators and incubators actually SLOW down the growth because they don't get the first stage right. The win is out of the gate. Get that right through 'small batch testing' and you'll have lots of help in the execution/scaling stage.