Last month I read the book The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. In this book, the author tell us how to apply Agile techniques, such as the ones that we are used to in software development, to the creation of new Startups or to innovate on established companies.
The author extracts the ideas from the Lean method used by Toyota and from his blog, startupsleassonslearned, and introduces us to the feedback loop “Build-Measure-Learn“.
The idea behind is, as in Lean, to eliminate all what is considered waste. What is waste when we are building a business or innovating inside a company? Waste is all the things we build/do, that are not going to give value. Why spend a lot of time and/or money (time is also money) building something that nobody wants? How can we avoid waste on that? The solution is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), that allows us to validate our leaps of faith on our product with the real world customers. This MVP will let us start with the  “Build-Measure-Learn” feedback loop as soon as possible, the feedback we get from this loop is called validated learning, because it is the result of the interaction of the product with its customers and this feedback will be betters as the best traditional management market research study you can make.
I strongly recommend you this book, I really liked it.