Question

what is an example of a situation in which a pilot study was not used and could have perhaps improved the outcome of an effort to innovate?

Answer 1

I worked on the project that dealt with the extraction of protein from the silk waste during my engineering. This was a very important project for us and the university also invested a lot of time and money in it. This was very innovative because no other team had worked on this and the applications of this project were huge. We just had some basic information available on the internet regarding the possibilities but we had to make sure that it can work if execute the project. The professors at the college provided some material that supported our idea again. Without thinking about running a pilot study we went ahead and started with the project execution. We collected the silk waste and started following the procedure we had in place for the extraction. This was a full-fledged project with 12 people involved and a good amount of money involved. When the project was almost 65% complete we got to know that we had missed a major step during the execution and there was no way to add that step in the middle. So we had to start from the scratch again and carry out the execution. If we had done a pilot study we could have saved a lot of time and money. At the same time. we could have innovated without any disturbances in the first attempt.