Great article in the Wall Street Journal today about Norman Borlaug.  A man who, the WSJ theorizes, saved billions of lives over his lifetime by teaching the world how to better grow food.  From the article:

Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre; by 2006, the figure was about 155 bushels per acre.

But Mr. Borlaug didn’t stop there.  He worked tirelessly to bring the farming techniques he pioneered to the developing world – saving dozens of countries from potential famine and, as the article put it, “diffused the population bomb”.  Read the article.

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail agrees.

If you had sat in on the pitch for these products, would you have been able to predict the one that went on to huge financial success?  This is what is meant by failing cheaply.  It is almost impossible to predict winners ahead of time.  As Eric Reis is always pointing out, you need to “get outside the building” to do “customer development”.

Now where’s my ice cream glove?

This is our business plan at Cloudbrain: Fail Cheaply.  When it comes to creating a new product, the biggest question businesses face these days is not “Can We Build This?” or “Will it Work?” – the most important question is “Will Anyone Care?”.

Unless you are creating a cure for cancer, a spray that vaporizes dog poo or a time machine, your new product not working is not your biggest risk.  The danger is that you spend a lot of money to build it, and no one wants it.  Or they do want it but don’t want to pay you for it.  And the only way to find out is to start asking people.  And not just your grandma or your friends.  Lots of people.  And you have to let them play with an early version, get their feedback, fix the product then repeat.  And you need to do this cheaply.  Because more likely than not, no one will care.

The Segway is the perfect example.  Built by a nerd that got a huge thrill from just making it work and trumpetted by bigger nerds that in no way were representative of normal people, millions of dollars were spent building a two-wheeled scooter and millions more spent promoting it.  And no one cared.  If they had built a non-working prototype, gone out to the local mall and asked people what they thought, people would have told them Segways look lazy and stupid.  Oops.

So… hold off on that venture capital.  Shelve that great idea for a TV commercial.  Forget that your mom love’s the idea.  Build a cheap version.  Go outside.  And find out what people think.  For real.