Small Wins Produce Results

Small wins produce results for a simple reason: it’s hard to argue against success. The fact that small wins work isn’t news to scholars of technological innovation. An extensive study involving five DuPont plants documented that minor technical changes (for example, introduction of forklift trucks)—rather than major changes (for example, introduction of new chemical processing technologies)—accounted for over two-thirds of the reductions in production costs over a thirty-year period.^[6] The minor technical changes were small improvements, made by people familiar with current operations. Less time, skill, effort, and expense were required to produce them than to implement the major changes. Much of the improvement was really part of the process of learning by doing.

The scientific community has always understood that major breakthroughs are likely to be the result of the work of hundreds of researchers, as countless contributions finally begin to add up to a solution. Taking the sum total, all the “little” improvements in technology, regardless of the industry, likely have contributed to a greater increase in organizational productivity than all the great inventors and their inventions.^[7] Indeed, researchers have found that rapid prototyping, and plenty of it, results in getting higher-quality products to the marketplace more quickly.^[8]