The key to successful innovation is to be "Outcome Focused." We need to focus on matching the Voice of the Idea with the Voice of the Customer. As such, I submit to you the following 8 step methodology of innovation in order to ensure you are successful:
1. External sensing ofMarket Trends with the ability to track shifts and deviations—which will allow you unique first mover market advantage. Be wary of the noises and learn to identify and distinguish the signals.
2. Track Customer Insights on buying performance and behaviours—providing you with distinct competitive market advantage. Create a Customer Experience Map to identify customer touch points with your product/service. Identify Customer Outcomes by using your customer experience map, to outline what the customer wants to accomplish at each touch point by customer segment.
3. Ensure you have an integrated and aligned business strategy controlled to deliver to the business the future state that it desires. A clear and fuzzy vision—clear on its core outputs and fuzzy at the edge to allow innovation to incubate. Innovation is the fuel that will power your fast-growth company on its journey to market leadership. But many businesses fail to set strategic priorities for innovation, or do this badly. Make innovation a boardroom issue.
4. Build predictable and systematic commercial innovation, which end to end matches customer and market shifts and trends. The road between a discovery generated from basic research to a commercial product or process is long and, according to some, rife with significant roadblocks. Therefore, take bold steps to incubate early stage innovation and build a framework that will help to realise the benefits of risk taking and the need for execution. Good ideas are too valuable to waste. Game-changing ideas are like gold dust: hard to find and easy to lose. Your search for them, and your process for developing them, should be rigorously managed company-wide. Innovation needs to be organised.
5. Use a transformational DNA system such as blackswan TDNA that constantly tracks the current business state and roadmaps accurately the route to the “future state‟ position. The blackswan TransformationDNA®, for example, provides organisations with a structure for the holistic measurement and improvement of their organisational performance. It also identifies outcomes with tangible gains, advises core elements for input into strategic agenda, enables structure within an organisation, integrates systems between silos and provides interventions that organisations can use. Through a unique diagnostic and solution engine, blackswan TransformationDNA® allows users to navigate their organisational profile, access reports on each element of that profile and receive recommendations for solutions that will help them achieve their own ideal final result.
6. Build a Future Proofed IP on tangibles and intangibles that allow businesses to maximise opportunities in the known markets and leverage effectively the untapped market, such as blackswan’s Apollo Sigma. blackswan’s Apollo Sigma has some three million data points that give some pretty decent insights into what works and what doesn’t work from an innovation perspective. The technology basically distils the findings from those data points and builds them into the analysis. It plots and measures current value index by looking at the rules of effective patent drafting. It calculates future value index based on the words that inventors use in their disclosures. These words are then mapped to establish future trend directions in order to ascertain the untapped potential left in the current solution.
7. Keep a constant focus on the “Mind-Set” of the business, which blends the cognitive trap of the hard metrics of “short term performance thinking‟ with “Organisational Health Methodology”. This thencreates the platform for change and innovation readiness. Your power to integrate makes you unique — don’t lose it. Bureaucratic thinking can kill innovation in a blink. It’s the leader’s responsibility to foster a creative culture.
8. Rethink how the business works, not just what it does. Entrepreneurs are often brilliant at thinking up new products and services. But to stay on your fast-growth path, you need to apply that same innovative zeal to how you run your business, not just what it does. Balance blue-sky and bottom line. Fast-growth companies must connect creativity and profit. If you cannot turn your new ideas into products and services that contribute to the bottom line, your journey to market leadership will slow or stop. You need the right balance between blue-sky thinking and making money.
These are the major considerations. What have you seen that I have missed?
