Last month I introduced
the Innovation Opportunities Map, an improved version of which is shown
above. We have recently been working with an entrepreneurial client
using this approach
to innovation, drawing on Clay Christensen's work and also on the ideas
in Blue Ocean Strategy. We are now on to the next stage of this
project, and it's turning into quite an interesting story.
Our
client is quite adamant that the innovations they seek to implement
must be highly visible to their customers, so we have been focusing
attention on the R&D, Sales & Marketing, Customer Relationship,
Product/Service Delivery and Life-Cycle Management megaprocesses shown
on the above chart -- the five megaprocesses most directly visible to
customers. In order to enhance our client's (and our) understanding of
customers' needs and wants, we have used cultural anthropology
extensively on this assignment, and our client is quite delighted with
the value of having a cross-sectional team of its people systematically
visiting customers, observing the use of their products, and
interviewing customers about their perceptions, ideas, needs and wants.
The
outcome of these 'visits', aside from a much better understanding of
their customers' businesses, and of the joys and frustrations customers
experience using our client's (and their competitors') products, has
been a large database of Learnings and Ideas. To oversimplify a bit,
here is the process they have employed to date:
- Understand
the urgency for, and set criteria for assessing, business innovations
for the company, and create a cross-functional Innovation Team.
- Learn,
through research, training sessions and by visiting highly innovative
companies, what business innovation really is, how it helps companies
compete sustainably and profitably in their marketplace, and the
process the Team will use to make the company more innovative.
- Understand,
through competitive intelligence and through 'cultural anthropology'
visits to selected customers, how customers experience the company's
(and competitors') products and services, what drives those customers'
buying decisions, and what 'keeps them awake at night'.
- Drawing on steps 2 and 3, create a database of Learnings and Ideas.
The next two steps, now in progress, are:
- Using
the Learnings and Ideas in the database, the Innovation Opportunities
Map, and an intensive process that draws on both the creative and the
critical thinking skills of the entire Innovation Team, and their
business knowledge, identify Innovation Opportunities that the company
could deploy to improve customer satisfaction and hence improve company
revenues, profitability and competitive position.
- Aggregate
these Innovation Opportunities into a series of Innovative Offerings,
and tell a Vision or Story about how each Offering would be experienced
from the customer's perspective.
Our client has distilled
hundreds of Learnings and Ideas down into about three dozen Innovation
Opportunities, and has now begun aggregating these into Innovative
Offerings using the following six-part template:
- A ten-word Name for the Innovative Offering.
- A
Tagline and/or statement of the Value Proposition ("how is this
different from and more valuable than what the company and competitors
offer now?") for the Offering.
- A listing of which of the
identified Innovation Opportunities this Offering aggregates, listed in
order by innovation type (A1 through J7) using the Innovation
Opportunities Map above.
- A 200-500 word Story, told from the
perspective of the customer in the future, explaining how the customer
experience will have changed as a result of implementing the Innovative
Offering.
- A list of New Capabilities the company would need to acquire in order to provide the Innovative Offering.
- A Strategy Canvas
(see example below, for a different industry than our client's) showing
the different strategies and strengths of the company both before and
after implementing the Innovative Offering, and contrasting them with
those of the company's major competitors.
The
Innovation Team is now beginning the process of debating the pros and
cons of the different Innovative Offerings the team members have come
up with. The plan is that those Offerings that they consider most
promising (using the set of criteria established in step 1) will then
be evaluated by senior management to evaluate their feasibility,
strategic fit etc., and will then be tested using small-scale
experiments with selected customers. Only once the Offerings have
passed all these hurdles will they be implemented full-scale.
Some
of the Offerings the team has come up with are quite awesome. They show
the power of combining a deep knowledge of customer needs, 'space' for
creativity and observation, a disciplined assessment process and the
'wisdom of crowds'. We may just be on to the perfect recipe for
entrepreneurial innovation. Stay tuned! |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
