Most new ventures fail.

This statement has been pounded into our entrepreneurial souls, at every step of our product development and growth journeys. It’s the reason why so many startup entrepreneurs and corporate intrapreneurs stop before they have a chance to get started. Nobody likes the thought of taking on a big risk, especially when facing a failure rate that some startup analysts quantify to be 92 percent.

It’s this idea that underscores the rationale for running a minimum viable product (MVP) that yields the highest return on investment at the lowest risk.

MVPs help entrepreneurs and corporate intrapreneurs outsmart the odds of failure by compartmentalizing big decisions—and big risks—into a series of smaller ones. As a result, we’re empowered to course-correct our decisions before risks outpace our chances for success.

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Photo credit: The Lean Startup Conference/Jakub Moser & Erin Lubin

Some businesses make innovation look easy. While most of us are struggling to find the right idea, certain brands (you know who you are, Apple, and yes, we’re jealous of you) seem to have everything together—steady streams of new products, never-before-seen branding concepts, and serious creative magic.

The untold story behind today’s most innovative brands, however, is what happens behind the scenes. While success stories are plentiful, what most people don’t see is the amount of trial, error, and learning that goes into setting up workflows, empowering employees, and figuring out initiatives to prioritize. Regardless of whether you’re a part of an established company or two-person startup, the task of bringing new ideas to market is hard.

Success with building an innovative culture boils down to one simple and completely ‘unsexy’ (at least to most of us) word: process. The following videos will show you what that process looks like for 5 very different companies.

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