Tim Harford has a nice post on the benefits of "fail fast, fail cheap". This bit at the end rang especially true to me:

“A subtler problem is that projects need a certain scale before powerful decision makers will take them seriously.

“The transaction costs involved in setting up any aid project are so great that most donors don’t want to consider a project spending less than £20m,” says Owen Barder, director for Europe at the Center for Global Development, a think-tank. I suspect that the same insight applies far beyond the aid industry. Governments and large corporations can find it’s such a hassle to get anything up and running that the big stakeholders don’t want to be bothered with anything small.

That is a shame. The real leverage of a pilot scheme is that although it is cheap, it could have much larger consequences. The experiment itself may seem too small to bother with; the lesson it teaches is not.”