Customer Inputs Needed to Master the Innovation Process: Desired Outcomes (A Metrics That Drive Innovation)

2008-08-19

Customers want to get more jobs done, but they also want to be able to do specific tasks faster, better, or cheaper than they can currently. To define just what “faster” or “better” means, companies must be able to capture from customers the set of metrics—measures of value, if you will—that define how they want to get the job done and what it means to get the job done perfectly. These metrics are the customers’ desired outcomes. This post is excerpted from Chapter 2 of “What Customers Want” by Anthony Ulwick

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The Most Critical Resources to Create New Markets: Time

The greatest expense for creating new markets is time. The effort takes time away from your core business (if you have one). It takes time away from other new market opportunities. It takes time away from your life and family. Time is unique as a resource in another way; expending time will also cost you people and money. If you lose a month or a year, you may not gain any benefit, but you still have to find the funding to cover that period. Your best employees and partners will lose a little patience with you for that. If you lose too much time, these people may start to look elsewhere for more rewarding projects. The cost of time is additive. You have to add both people and money. This post is excerpted from chapter 2 of “creating and dominating new markets”, by Peter Meyer.

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Applying Five Innovation Patterns: The Reinvention of a Business Card

The five innovation patterns described in the post “Five Ways To Draw New Product Ideas Out Of Current Products” are at the heart of a creative process founded on the notion that function follows form. You start with an existing product, apply one or more patterns to come up with variations of it, and then determine what, if any, benefits these variants might offer customers. In this post, we see here how Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), the consulting firm of two of the coauthors, applied the subtraction and task unification patterns to the redesign of its business card.

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Applying Five Innovation Patterns in Drawing New Products Ideas

In previous post, the five innovation patterns (i.e. Substraction; Multiplication; Division; Task Unification and Attribute Dependency Change), proposed by Jacob Goldenberg; David Mazursky; Roni Horowitz and Amnon Levav, have been introduced. These five patterns may seem relatively straightforward, but applying them takes some practice. According to Jacob Goldenberg; David Mazursky; Roni Horowitz and Amnon Levav, this process is hard work, and people usually take a while to feel comfortable with it. But if the process were easy, it would have much less success. With innovation, the best results typically come by following the nonintuitive route. This post is excerpted from “Finding Your Innovation Sweet Spot” by Jacob Goldenberg; David Mazursky; Roni Horowitz and Amnon Levav, published in HBR March 2003.

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Domains of Differentiation: Distribution

For a number of companies, the primary form of differentiation is farther down the value chain—in the means or channels of distribution. Exemplars in this domain are Amazon.com, Dell Computer, Mary Kay, and Snap-On. These companies have chosen to reach their target markets in ways that confer an advantage not shared by their rivals who have chosen more traditional channels. However, Terry R. Bacon and David G. Pugh warned in their book “Winning Behavior: What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently” that although each of these companies has been able to differentiate itself through its primary distribution channel, nothing in their business model protects them from rivals who choose to copy them.

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Building a Winning Business Model That Can Create Shareholder Value

According to Mark Thomas, Gary Miles, and Peter Fisk, a wining business model has to satisfy three conditions. One of the conditions is the creation of shareholder value. To be successful in creating shareholder value, the business model must be able to create value for the other stakeholders in the business, or they will cease to provide the input the business needs to survive. If the amount of value created for each of the other stakeholder groups is estimated, it is clear that by far the largest slice of value created by the organization is the customer value. This post is excerpted from Chapter 3, Part 2 of “The Complete CEO: The Executive’s Guide to Consistent Peak Performance”, by Mark Thomas, Gary Miles, and Peter Fisk.

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Types of Company to Benefit from Strategy Innovation

A strategy innovation process may not be right for every company. However, it is difficult to cite what type of company would not benefit from understanding their customers better, gaining valuable foresight about their emerging marketplace, and considering how changes in their business model could provide a competitive advantage. This post, excerpted from Chapter 2 of “The Power of Strategy Innovation,” by Robert E. Johnston Jr., J. Douglas Bate, presents some pre-conditions that a company can benefit from strategy innovation.

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