In industries as diverse as airlines and public education, the crucial first step is to decide what you want your product to do. When I set out to explain the theory of disruptive innovation, I purposely chose the somewhat generic term "performance" to describe how products, services or technologies improve over time. This is reflected in the core diagram of the disruptive innovation model, which describes the performance trajectories of technologies over time.
You've got a business idea you're jazzed about, but aren't sure if it's feasible. What you need to do is test the concept to see how it stands up to a series of rigorous questions.
"You are always testing," says Andre Marquis, Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "What you start with is rarely what you end up with."