Most people think innovation is a numbers game. The more “at bats” you take, the more hits you’ll get. And the more winning products you want, the more ideas you need to generate and experiments you need to run.

People often justify this approach with Thomas Edison’s famous quote:

“I have not failed 10,000 times; I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

But that’s only half the story.

After wasting time and money developing his very first patented invention, Edison also said that he:

“…would never invent something without first knowing there was a need for it.” (To learn more about Edison’s experience, see my interview with Forbes: When Not to Fail Faster).

Maybe that’s the Edison folklore we should be telling our innovation teams?

In fact, the thousands of experiments that Edison ran throughout his career were designed only to test the efficacy of his product solution in solving a known customer need.

Generating a lot of ideas and “failing faster” is most effective when the problem or objective has already been clearly defined and validated by the target customer.

That’s because, as Tony Ulwick, the chief pioneer of JTBD, has pointed out, good science calls us to solve for X (the independent variable) and then Y (the dependent variable). To attempt to solve both X and Y in one experiment conflates the results, impedes learning, and tends to waste a lot of time and money, as Edison experienced.

But when you first solve for X (the customers’ unmet needs), then it’s relatively easy to solve for Y (the solution type and features).

Maybe innovation is more like archery than baseball: first take aim, and then fire away with ideas?