Product testing is the way most inventors and organizations go about innovation. It
may not be the quickest route to success, but it is often the surest. Jonas Salk, for
example, discovered the polio vaccine by spending most of his time testing and testing
and continually finding out what didn’t work. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the
filament light bulb, recorded 10,000 experiments that were complete failures. But he
was able to keep going because, as he said, he knew 10,000 ways that it wasn’t going
to work.