If You Build It, They Won't Necessarily Come – Alberto Savoia, Innovation Expert and Author of The Right It – Getting Serious About Your Ideas and Mapping a Route for Success, Before You Invest

Alberto Savoia, innovation expert, disrupter, and author of, The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail, and How to Make Yours Succeed, delivers a lively analysis of the many ways businesses fail, and succeed.

Savoia is a seasoned tech expert and business consultant who is in high demand at conferences and events. He is a lecturer and innovation consultant at Stanford University and was a key player at Google in the highly sought-after position of innovation agitator. During Savoia's early career as an engineer and eventually as an engineering executive and CTO he worked for innovation giants such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and Google. Joining Sun Microsystems and Google as well back when they were just start-ups, Savoia's knowledge and leadership was instrumental in both companies' steady climb to success. Perhaps it can be said that Savoia's biggest asset is his ability to help businesses stimulate and foster groundbreaking innovation that yields high-impact product development.

Savoia talks about his background, starting with early success in the video game space that led to his tenure at Sun Microsystems and eventually Google. He discusses his start-ups and some of his successes and failures. And it was his first failure that inspired him to eventually write his popular business book, The Right It. After suffering a failed start-up Savoia returned to Google, but was still motivated to dig deeper, to help others understand their businesses and succeed in the market. Savoia details how he studied failure, talking to anyone and everyone who would discuss their business failures. From hard data to personal interviews, he amassed a wealth of information that led him to some clear observations about business success and failure. One primary point Savoia nailed down was that most business failures are not because of problems with personnel or execution, but because the company has launched the wrong product. It's simply the wrong idea. Savoia states that you want to be sure you are building the right it, before you build it right. Savoia gives a detailed analysis of how company owners and entrepreneurs can find their way in a crowded marketplace, and get an understanding of how their product might fair in the market—in the future—before they get there in terms of development and manufacturing. Savoia cites multiple examples of companies' successes and failures. He outlines the concept of pretotyping, which is ultra-rapid prototyping, essentially a way of envisioning your product before it is developed and built.

The technology expert provides examples of the many ways that companies can collect data. He delivers an interesting overview of his theories through an example of McDonalds, if they were to introduce a new product, such as spaghetti. He explains that a good way for McDonalds to pretotype is to simply put it on the menu, before it exists. When customers order it, they get a free lunch—no spaghetti, but everyone wins. McDonalds collects valuable data up front before investing in their spaghetti product, and the customer gets a free lunch. Savoia states, if there's a market, there is a way. Thus it is important to find out what the market wants.

Savoia cites examples of companies that spent fortunes up front but then failed. Savoia stresses that you must have the right idea, of course, but the timing of delivery of a product is also critical. It's important to remember that you can fall in love with your idea and be blinded by that, ignoring the negative data, and heading full speed toward potential failure at launch.

And finally, Savoia explains that he practices what he preaches for he actually pretotyped his book before writing the full version. And seeing his shortened version of the book takes off, he then knew that he needed to launch it fully.

Savoia is the recipient of numerous awards recognizing him as a true pioneer in the area of business innovation, such as: Wall Street Journal Technical Innovator Award (2005), InfoWorld Top 25 CTOs Award (2005), Software Development Magazine Jolt Award (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award (2005, 2006), JavaOne Duke Award for Technical Excellence (2005), and many more.