[cbs]

>Therein lies the value of innovation - several failed multi-million dollar marketing campaigns VS a lean startup reaching the same conclusion and offering the same solution.

Hindsight is awesome, isn't it? They had now way to know that your startup wasn't destine to fail, but now that your idea has been successfully executed by someone else you feel vindicated. Great, but that doesn't retroactively make you less of a risk back then nor does it prove that you would have executed on your idea as well as the people they went with.

[scheff]

I knew with foresight that it was the correct premise because I saw it working already in other formats. The only question remaining was "what is the best format/execution to make it work?" and that is the uncertainty of which you speak. Innovation allows us to rapidly fail and learn so as to come up with the correct solution. Tourism Australia's answer was to keep creating multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, which teaches us little and wastes millions of dollars, and takes months of retrospective analysis to learn anything. All that we've learnt from the marketing campaigns is "People aren't as interested in Australia as they were 20 years ago." With a tech startup solution we would have learnt a number of things through observation of how the target demographic interact with each other and with tourism operators, plus what they best respond to, and therefore how best to promote Australian tourism products to them.