27,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A step-by-step guide to successfully transforming any organization It is well recognized that succeeding at innovation is fundamental in today's hyper-competitive global marketplace. It is the only way to outperform current and emerging competitors sustainably. But what we call "innovation" is messy and difficult and too often lacks the rigor and discipline of other management processes. The Innovator's Field Guide: Market Tested Methods and Frameworks to Help You Meet Your Innovation Challenges changes that. It is a practical guide that moves beyond the "why" to the "how" of making innovation happen, for leaders and practitioners inside organizations of all sizes. Written by two pioneers in the field of embedding innovation in organization, The Innovator's Field Guide focuses on the most pressing innovation problems and specific challenges innovation leaders will face and offers concrete solutions, tools, and methods to overcome them. * Each chapter describes a specific innovation challenge and details proven ways to address that challenge * Includes practical ideas, techniques, and leading practices * Describes common obstacles and offers practical solutions Any leader or professional who needs concrete solutions--right now--to the critical challenges of innovation will find invaluable aid in the practical, easy-to-understand, and market-tested approaches of The Innovator's Field Guide.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 355
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Ähnliche
Contents
Chapter 1: Setting Context
About This Field Guide
The Innovation Challenges
Principles of Innovation
As You Read The Guide
Chapter 2: Raising Your Innovation IQ Through Insight-Driven Innovation
What Is a “Great Insight”?
Five Insight Types
Chapter 3: Enabling Breakthrough Innovation
Enabling Breakthrough Innovations Through Insight Combinations
Domaining: Building a Pipeline of Related Concepts
Bringing Strategic Focus to Your Efforts: Innovation Architecture
Chapter 4: From Nascent Idea to Business Concept
Changing Your Mind-Set About the Innovation Process
The SEI Approach
Using an Iterative Learning Process
Don’t Take Opportunity Elaboration and Framing for Granted
Fast-Tracking Opportunities When You Believe Speed to Market Is Critical
Chapter 5: Propelling Fast Innovation
Engaging the Organization Through Focused Innovation Challenges
Innovation Accelerators
Open Innovation: Moving Faster Than Your Internal Development
Chapter 6: Experimentation and De-Risking
Framing Risk to Manage It
Defining Your Learning Path
Developing Your Experimentation Agenda
Experimentation in Action
Chapter 7: Innovating While in Market
Innovating While Flying the Plane
Principles to Guide Postlaunch Innovation
Using Front-End Techniques in Postlaunch Activities: Develop New Insights to Enable New Learning
Translating Insights into Action
Continue to Experiment for Postlaunch Learning and Revision
Postlaunch Innovation: Illustrative Design Approaches
Postlaunch Innovation Pioneers: Select Case Examples
Postlaunch Innovation Issues to Anticipate
Chapter 8: Organizing for Innovation
A Framework for Organizing the Elements of Innovation
Design Principles for Organizing for Innovation
The Organizing Elements
Case Examples: Organizing for Innovation
Chapter 9: Leading Innovation
Leading Innovation from the Top
Driving Leadership Engagement in Innovation
An Example of Innovation Leadership Engagement
Leading Innovation from the Top: Who’s on Point?
Top Leadership as an Indispensable Element
Leading from Within: Grassroots-Led Innovation
Chapter 10: Getting Started
Designing from Outcomes Back
Different Types of Innovation Outcomes
High-Level Designs for Frequently Desired Outcomes
Getting Started: Assembling the Team
Assessing Issues and Approach: Innovation Assessment and Design
Before You Begin: Some Additional Tips
Chapter 11: Conclusion and Looking Ahead
Flexible, Reconfigurable Techniques for Addressing Innovation Challenges
Be Alert for Common Pitfalls
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
More from Wiley
Index
Cover design by Adrian Morgan
Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Brand
One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skarzynski, Peter.
The innovator’s field guide : market-tested methods and frameworks to help you meet your innovation challenges / Peter Skarzynski and David Crosswhite.—First edition.
1 online resource.
Includes index.
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
ISBN 978-1-118-64457-7 (pdf) — ISBN 978-1-118-64439-3 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-118-64430-0 (pbk.)
1. Technological innovations—Management. 2. Creative ability in business. 3. New products. I. Crosswhite, David, 1961- II. Title.
HD45
658.4'063—dc23
2013049114
To the clients we served over the past two decades, thank you for your trust, inspiration, and tireless efforts to keep each of your organizations vital through strategic innovation.
And to our families, thank you for your support through it all. Your patient support helps us create the future with others—thank you for creating it for us.
Chapter 1
Setting Context
You know that innovation is a top priority. Chances are that you are or have been on an innovation team or leading one within your organization.
You have a difficult job. We know this from over twenty-five years of helping others design, implement, and capture value from innovation. We’ve done this as consultants and practitioners in large, globally dispersed organizations and in small and midsize companies, B2B and B2C settings, and in both for-profit and nonprofit environments.
We are passionate about innovation because we have seen how it keeps organizations vital and resilient. We want your organization to stay vital and resilient: resilient to the tremendously powerful market forces of globalization, rapid shifts in technology, and an increasingly powerful customer base.
About This Field Guide
There is no lack of innovation books. Many focus on an overarching theory of innovation or focus more deeply on a particular aspect of innovation, such as rapid-cycle experimentation, design thinking, or business model innovation. At the same time, more and more organizations are following the pioneering efforts of companies like Whirlpool Corporation, General Electric, and Proctor & Gamble in viewing innovation as a discipline and process that can be taught, learned, and applied.
As we meet and work with these and other innovation leaders and practitioners globally, we hear consistently that there is not yet a comprehensive, practical, how-to guide detailing market-tested techniques, tools, and frameworks through which you can address the most pressing innovation challenges in your organization. This field guide addresses those challenges in an end-to-end fashion, helping you take action, whether you seek a specific solution, such as de-risking a promising but new-to-the-industry business concept, or you have an ambition to make innovation an enterprise-wide capability.
We write this field guide for innovation leaders and practitioners in organizations large and small who seek step-change improvement in their organization’s, teams’, or individual innovation efforts. Each of you faces different innovation challenges. Our goal is to provide practical techniques, guidance, and examples to help you navigate your unique situation. We hope that whether you are a novice or a master, you will find The Guide indispensable in helping you achieve your innovation goals.
There is great value in having a shared set of tools within your organization. Common tools, techniques, and frameworks help ensure consistency and can serve as a foundation for an enterprise-wide process for innovation. Yet it is important to understand that innovation is not about tools per se. You will not succeed by simply filling in a given tool. Rather, we see tools as scaffolding; they provide structure to achieve the appropriate organizational learning and dialogue about a particular issue or challenge.
Our approach to the topic of innovation is that of business managers and strategists. For over two decades, we have worked with Global 1000 companies to shape and act on their strategic growth agenda. You will see in The Guide that, rather than focusing on technology or a particular product, our innovation work features the business model and its elements as the unit of analysis. We also place enormous emphasis on both fact-based analysis and frame-breaking perspectives.
You will also see we consistently emphasize the importance of creating time and space for innovation inside your organization. By this we mean more than the notion “spend X percent of your time on anything you want” as the means by which to innovate at scale. In most organizations, declaring that all engineers should take X percent of their time to think of new things and innovate is simply a nonstarter, and rightfully so.
Instead we recommend that you free up time and space to pursue thoughtful and disciplined approaches and make organizing actions to allow your organization to create and drive innovation. You should, for example, build a point of view that informs your innovation. You must take time to stretch, elaborate, and iterate a given new concept. Leadership should make time to take on the roles of cocreator, sponsor, and visible advocate for innovation. And, together with leadership, you and your innovation colleagues should organize to sustainably pursue your innovation ambition. In this context, creating space to drive innovation is more than freeing up time to think great thoughts and experiment on them. It is a critical enabler to pursuing innovation in a disciplined fashion, leveraging innovation activities, approaches, and organizing elements such as those addressed in this guide.
Each chapter of this field guide focuses on an innovation challenge that consistently emerges as difficult and important within organizations across industries and geographies. In each chapter, we
This is the heart of Innovator’s Field Guide: to share actionable innovation tools and approaches for you to apply, illustrated with real-world examples; and, where appropriate, to identify common pitfalls to avoid and offer specific counsel on what not to do.
The Innovation Challenges
Raising Your Innovation IQ Through Insight-Driven Innovation (Chapter 2)
We begin by sharing techniques and frameworks you can use to develop new perspectives and new thinking about the market, your organization, and your stakeholders. The chapter offers concrete actions for developing frame-breaking insights that are foundational to success throughout a generalized front-end innovation process.
Breaking frame is so important to innovation. Gifted entrepreneurs break frame naturally. The rest of us need a bit of help. We need new perspectives and fresh insights to think and see differently. Most organizations struggle to develop rich, compelling insights, but they are critical to innovating successfully. Without new perspectives, efforts tend toward the incremental or, worse, stall completely. This chapter will help you, your team, and your organization develop the types of insights you will need to raise your innovation IQ.1
Enabling Breakthrough Innovation (Chapter 3)
In this chapter, we continue sharing leading practices to apply within a generalized front end of the innovation process in order to drive breakthrough innovation. We start by illustrating some of our favorite techniques for developing new ideas. We also suggest an approach that will help you focus your innovation efforts on your most important strategic challenges, and you will learn techniques to help bring greater coherence to current and future innovation efforts across your organization. All of this will help you stay away from the business of “one-off” innovation. You will see how Crayola, Royal Dutch Shell, UnitedHealth Group, and others identify and act on new white space opportunities, sustainably and profitably guided by dynamic innovation architecture.2
From Nascent Idea to Business Concept (Chapter 4)
Chapter Four focuses on the work of moving from a nascent idea to a business concept, helping you advance your thinking to create a more fully fleshed-out business concept and game plan for getting started. Without this work, you may never get beyond a pile of Post-it notes. We share a generalized process to illustrate key techniques, while emphasizing that each organization will need to develop its own tailored process.
Sometimes opportunities stall. So we suggest specific techniques to help you stretch, elaborate, and iterate your thinking about and framing of the opportunity so that you can unstick that opportunity. We also provide guidelines to help you decide why you may wish to kill it off entirely.
These and other techniques will help you jump-start innovation in your organization, regardless of where the idea came from. The chapter takes you up to the “commercialization” step of a given innovation process, an area that most innovation efforts too often ignore or take for granted. Taken together, Chapters Two through Four serve as a blueprint for breakthrough innovation across the front-end innovation process, enabling you to jump to the next S-curve and propel growth for your organization.
Propelling Fast Innovation (Chapter 5)
We understand that you may not always have the time to build the types of rich insights described in Chapter Two or to pursue breakthrough innovation as we describe in Chapter Three. Sometimes you are asked to “get innovation fast.” In this chapter, we share a series of case examples which illustrate how you can improve the quality of your innovation portfolio for the near term—twelve to twenty-four months out. Through the examples we share ways in which you can combine techniques already described in The Guide to achieve “innovation fast”—whether infusing innovative thinking into your annual planning process or in a workshop-based format. We touch on collaborative idea management, open innovation, innovation accelerators, and supplier and customer collaborations.
Experimentation and De-Risking (Chapter 6)
The kind of breakthrough innovation we discuss in Chapter Three is often new to an organization and sometimes new to its industry. When you surface something that is new with respect to your past experiences, an individual, a team, or management is likely to perceive a high degree of uncertainty and risk in the new concept or business model. In this chapter, we share market-tested techniques that help you separate risk from uncertainty. The approaches help you de-risk promising but uncertain opportunities and guide you in moving your efforts forward in smart and risk-managed ways.
Innovating While in Market (Chapter 7)
In this chapter, we extend current experimentation practice, describing ways in which you can turbocharge opportunities that are already in market and reshape them for greater success. For in-market opportunities that are falling short of their ambition, we describe techniques through which you can iteratively test, learn, and refine efforts so that you can get the new product or service heading in the right direction, and optimize the “upside.” For opportunities that are performing as planned, you will learn how to infuse more innovation. You might think of this as “innovating while flying the plane.”
Organizing for Innovation (Chapter 8)
We opened this book with the declaration that innovation is now a top priority across organizations globally. Yet despite innovation’s higher profile, we find that many organizations struggle with how to best organize for innovation. Chapter Eight guides you through ways to think about organizing for innovation within the context of your objectives and culture. We speak to specific ways in which you can strengthen innovation muscle, improve processes, and dramatically improve your chances that innovation will happen “because of the system” rather than in spite of it. We hope that this chapter guides your efforts in making innovation an enterprise discipline, process, and capability within your organization.
Leading Innovation (Chapter 9)
Much of this field guide speaks to leading innovation efforts as a lead designer and practitioner, and assumes that you have some level of organizational permission for driving systematic innovation. In Chapter Nine, we speak specifically to the leader’s role in innovation. We start at the point of leadership’s recognition that innovation will provide the means to achieve a particular growth goal and, when desired, to help enable cultural change. We describe the leader’s role in making innovation a reality both commercially and as a process and system within the organization. We also speak to how a practitioner with little or no formal accountability for innovation can lead innovation from within—an important topic when you do not have the full set of permissions or sponsorship necessary for success.
Getting Started (Chapter 10)
Chapter Ten helps you structure and begin your innovation efforts in ways that ensure success. We provide examples of program designs that you can use to tackle the challenges described in this guide, and conclude by sharing suggested profiles of skills and mind-sets you will want to include in your efforts as you get going.
Conclusion and Looking Ahead (Chapter 11)
We conclude by sharing a few general thoughts and suggestions on driving success in your innovation efforts and systems and posit a view on the next frontiers for innovation in large organizations.
Principles of Innovation
Over the years, we’ve seen what works and what does not. In looking across these successes and failures, one can tease out a set of principles of successful innovation that hold true regardless of industry, constraints, or circumstance—principles that organizations apply to help them innovate and to do so systematically over time.
You will see that the principles advocate driving strategic innovation. In this context, we recommend that you enter the innovation room through the strategy door, so to speak. Aim innovation efforts at your most central growth issues and needs. Drive holistic, business-concept-level thinking and iteration. Develop a shared point of view on what qualifies as innovation and what is most important to drive toward. Develop multilevel points of view of innovation targeting priority growth spaces and concepts within the spaces. Engage in strategic dialogue and decision making to ensure that there is shared and aligned leadership understanding and commitment. Each of these actions follows from the principles guiding strategic innovation and is central to your success.
Of course, in translating principles to action, your specific designs and approach will vary greatly. But the principles are centrally important. Therefore, we make them explicit here and throughout The Guide so that you will keep them top of mind. You should think of these principles as “why you are doing what you are doing.”
Articulate a clear definition of innovation for your organization
by defining what you are trying to achieve. Do you seek transformative, disruptive innovation? Is your goal to create profitable incremental and sustaining innovation? Might you have an ambition to shift mind-sets or change the culture incrementally or in a more substantial way? Whatever your objective, you need to have a definition that you and your colleagues can use as a compass to guide your work and keep you focused on the outcomes you seek. We speak to this issue throughout the book, and most specifically in Chapter Eight.
Aim your efforts at the business concept
so that you focus not just on the “what” of products but also the “who and how.” A singular focus on “what” constrains you to the default thinking of “what” new product or service or “what” new technology you can commercialize into a new product or service. It’s an appropriate focus, of course. However, you can expand your innovation potential greatly by also including “who and how.”
Understand that innovation equals new learning
. This is a big one. Think of it this way: if you have little to no new learning, then you have little to no chance of finding truly new innovation. You can gain this new learning in many ways, as described throughout this guide. We urge you to create the space to attain new learning and then to synthesize and process it for all the potential that it holds. Give yourself sufficient space to diverge in your learning, thinking, and ideation. Also ensure that you create sufficient space again to converge and synthesize down to the best learning and actions
for your organization
. In nearly all chapters, you will see techniques, approaches, and examples illustrating how to act on the principle of making space for acquiring and then processing new learning.
Earn the right to ideate through insight-driven innovation
. Don’t start with new ideas. Start with new insights, which help you develop new and different perspectives about your particular innovation challenge. New perspectives lead you to ask a different set of questions. New ideas should derive from new, relevant, frame-breaking insights—however you attain them. All leading practice demonstrates that when concepts are created in this way, they are much more likely to be breakthrough and compelling in the marketplace and for your organization. When they are not new insights, they are likely to be regenerations of the same old ideas—one reason that the work of innovation gets a bad rap. As Drucker, Hamel, and others suggest, new questions lead to new answers. Before trying to create new ideas, work on new perspectives. This principle is inherent in all the techniques described in The Guide, and is most directly addressed in Chapter Two.
Focus on strategic innovation to avoid one-off efforts
. Too many innovation processes and work efforts look for silver-bullet insights and ideas. We suggest another path: strategic innovation through which you develop specific product and service concepts within the context of a coherent, compelling, longer-term view of a market space you will pursue over time. The longer-term view enables you to fill your pipeline with a related set of product and/or service concepts that you can bring to market over time. It gets you out of the business of having to restart your innovation efforts from scratch whenever you wish to refresh the pipeline. In Chapter Three we suggest such techniques to move beyond one-off innovation.
Make the work of innovation not merely the generating of new ideas but an end-to-end process through to successful commercialization
. We like to define the work of innovation as that which ultimately enables a new idea to be successfully commercialized. Thinking of innovation in this end-to-end way drives the discipline of viewing innovation as more than just new idea generation. Indeed, the work of innovation spans from gaining new insights to generating new ideas to engaging in business planning and strategic planning to conducting in-market experimentation and garnering continuous learning for constant improvement of in-market offerings. This end-to-end definition enables you to achieve better results because it doesn’t partition innovation off as an ideas-only notion or a “front end of the process” concept. The chapters throughout The Guide describe all phases of innovation from insights to commercialization and even postlaunch actions that continue to work the innovation agenda.
Build innovation capability through a learn-by-doing approach
. At all levels of the organization, learning new innovation techniques and approaches is best facilitated by applying the techniques to real problems or challenges. Classroom training and practice sessions have their purpose, but these alone will not create or embed skills and capability. You may want this to be a guided experience from the beginning. It is hard to learn to ride a bike when you are in a classroom talking about it; the same is true of learning to drive innovation within organizations that are geared to efficiently churn out their existing offerings. We share learning-by-doing techniques throughout The Guide.
Be systematic and systemic in your approach
. Too many leaders and practitioners believe that one can either have a creative, innovative approach
or
have a planned and disciplined approach. The reality: disciplined, systematic innovation is not an oxymoron. You can enable and manage disciplined processes that drive innovation and provide the flexibility you need to make alterations as new learning dictates.
Embrace and apply open innovation
(OI), keeping in mind Henry Chesbrough’s dictum that “to be open externally one must first be open internally.”
3
Throughout The Guide, we suggest techniques through which you and your colleagues can become more open internally by exploring new perspectives, new opportunity spaces, and ways in which to structure and organize your innovation efforts. Extend the principle of “innovation equals new learning” beyond the water’s edge of your organization’s boundaries. Learn to access outside sources—for learning, for ideas, for technologies, and for commercialization resources. Chesbrough and others write extensively and well about OI, so we do not delve deeply into the topic in The Guide. However, Chapter Five speaks directly to useful OI techniques.
As You Read The Guide
The Guide speaks to the “how-to” of all these principles of innovation and a few others as well. Before we dive in, a few notes:
You will see examples throughout that illustrate the points and the successful execution of the approaches and techniques we recommend. We have deliberately drawn examples from a diverse set of companies, industries, and geographies: from Shell to Whirlpool Corporation to Mondelēz to Crayola to UnitedHealth Group to the U.S. Special Operations Command, and others. Some organizations are good examples of systematic and systemic innovators, and thus are used repeatedly; others are good illustrations of specific techniques in The Guide.
We use both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) references and examples throughout. Robust innovation techniques are applicable across both worlds, although particulars of how to investigate insights, develop and elaborate ideas, and commercialize vary from one to the other. In the context of speaking to both circumstances, you will see references to both consumers and customers. In referring to consumers, we are typically referring to the end user of a particular product or service. In referring to customers, we are typically referring to the next-level buyer in the value delivery system, which can include (but is not limited to) retailers. We will identify each (consumers versus customers) as we refer to them.
We provide key take-aways at the end of each chapter. If you think you would find it helpful to first read a quick summary of each chapter in a page or less, please skip to the back of the chapter to do so.
We refer to the teachings of others from whom we’ve learned over the years of working in the field. For a small slice of further reference materials (which are vast in quantity), refer to the Notes section of the book, where we reference sources of information and inspiration we’ve learned from and pulled from as we constructed
Innovator’s Field Guide
.
Last but not least, have fun with your innovation work! Innovation is hard, but it is one of the greatest challenges and professional privileges you will take on. Recognize the opportunity and enjoy the ride.
Notes
1. The authors are grateful to Holly Green, who first introduced us to the notion of innovation IQ. See her article “Test Your Innovation IQ” in Forbes, December 6, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2011/12/06/test-your-innovation-iq/.
2. Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson, Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2008).
3. “Henry Chesbrough’s Top Tips on Applying Open Innovation,” IdeaConnection (blog), December 14, 2012, http://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/2012/12/henry-chesbroughs-top-tips-on-applying-open-innovation/.
Chapter 2
Raising Your Innovation IQ Through Insight-Driven Innovation
How do I make sense of the changes in our market?
How might I use our existing know-how (competencies) to enter and flourish in new markets?
How can I surprise and delight my customers with products and services “they have to have”?
Where and why might I be “blind” to new opportunities?
“Think different.” Apple’s iconic marketing campaign was highly innovative, with complimentary winks both to its customers—Youare different in ways that matter—and to its development teams—We are different (and better) than any other company.1
Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs was perhaps the best example of a great entrepreneur who succeeded by thinking different. “Thinking different” is essential to innovation. But most companies don’t have a Steve Jobs with naturally reflexive innovation instincts. What to do?
You can think like an entrepreneur. Each of us can. Most of us will not achieve the same success as Steve Jobs. But we can all raise our innovation IQs by learning how to use the same perspectives and mind-sets. As British historian Paul Johnson says, “There is creativity in all of us, and the only [challenge] is how to bring it out.”2
If you seek innovation—especially breakthrough innovation—you have to think differently. Here’s why: You will not get to breakthrough by asking the same questions. Instead you need to break frame through new insights. New insights help you develop new perspectives: new perspectives on your customers, your market, and your company. New perspectives give you the foundation on which to develop new thinking. New perspectives give you the right to ideate.
What Is a “Great Insight”?
WPP’s Jeremy Bullmore famously quipped, “Why is a good insight like a refrigerator? Because the moment you look into it, a light comes on.” Bullmore suggests that “high-potency insights, because of their immediacy—because they evoke as well as inform—behave like the best viral ads on the Internet. They are infectious; we only have to hear them once to remember them, to apply them, to pass them on to others. By contrast, the low-potency insight sits there sullenly on its PowerPoint slide, moving absolutely nobody to enlightenment, let alone action.”3
You should be able to describe a good insight crisply, often in a brief sentence. The insight should do two or more of the following:
Reveal deep and previously unrevealed behavior
Suggest the potential for disruption—a discontinuous shift
Point you toward a customer compromise or trade-off that, given the choice, the customer would rather prefer not to make
Challenge current conventions in the market or industry
Make some people uncomfortable while inspiring others
Create an “oh yes” moment through which you
think different
Earning the Right to Ideate Through New Frame-Breaking Perspectives
We describe five specific types of insights in the next section. Developing new perspectives within any of the five types will help you develop new and interesting ideas.
As you will see, however, you are more likely to develop compelling ideas by looking at the intersection of multiple insights. As Gary Hamel remarks, the combinatory power of multiple types of insights will significantly enhance your ability to develop truly breakthrough concepts and to identify and capture “white space” opportunities.4
Why these five types? Reflect for a moment on what makes a great entrepreneur like Apple’s cofounder. Sure, great entrepreneurs take risks. But how do they think? How do they approach their business and markets?
Great entrepreneurs are more naturally empathetic to consumers’ frustrations. They sense unarticulated needs of customers, so they can conceive of products or services that don’t yet exist, and solve problems that customers may not be able to describe. Think about Apple’s iPad; social media businesses like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; Bruce Johnson’s Breathe Right nasal strips; or the broad product portfolio of Sarah Blakely’s Spanx fashion empire.
Great entrepreneurs experience more of “the fringe” of a market. They make sense of the early signs of change. They anticipate disruption and discontinuous change.
They also are not bound by a current set of products or services. Rather than defining their business as what they make or sell, they view growth potential from the standpoint of their current and evolving know-how: their competencies.
Great entrepreneurs are contrarians. They do not accept the dominant logic of a given industry or market. They intuitively, naturally, and instinctively challenge and overturn core assumptions about what drives success, and create new business models that perform differently in ways that matter to customers. By challenging the core assumptions of their business model and industry, they are able to see new opportunities. Consider the success of Virgin Air, easyJet, GOL Air Transport, Netflix, Zipcar, Tata Motors, and IKEA.
Five Insight Types
We will now look at each of these five insight types:
Type 1: Customer insight
Type 2: Market discontinuities
Type 3: Competencies and strategic assets
Type 4: Industry orthodoxies
Type 5: Seeing and mapping white space
For each insight type, we will first share a definition and set the context. We will then describe how you can quickly get started in developing the insights and using them in the context of your specific innovation challenge. Finally, we will suggest a few pointers for applying them to your own organization.
Getting Started: Identifying Customers’ Unmet Needs
Surfacing unarticulated needs is a two-step process. First, gather information on customer behavior using direct observation and related techniques. Then step back and analyze this information using methods to extract and infer potential unstated needs. Separating the information-gathering and analysis steps allows you to shift focus from identifying the visible “what the customer is doing” to surfacing the underlying and vitally important “why they are doing it.” Even experts use this two-step process, although they may move between the steps so quickly as to make them appear to be a single step.
Obtaining Data
“You can observe a lot by watching.”5 So says American baseball great Yogi Berra, and so say successful innovators, and so say proponents of design thinking. High-impact observational research techniques integrate design thinking and human-centered design principles to help you “get into the skin of the customer.” It helps you understand the customer’s context, desires and aspirations, and fears and frustrations, so that you can identify their unmet and unarticulated needs. The tensions and trade-offs you observe in their decisions and behaviors will allow you to develop new solutions they could not have conceived of on their own.
Let’s look at an example. Crayola is an iconic brand spanning product lines within a privately held consumer products company. From your childhood, you likely know it as a “crayon” company. Today it is much more. Through years of steady focus on innovation, Crayola has reimagined its business, redefining the categories in which it competes and achieving significant growth.8
When leadership initiated its innovation efforts in 2004, they hoped to bring value to children through positive, enjoyable learning experiences that would go well beyond crayons. Foundational to their efforts was to more viscerally understand the ways in which children, caregivers, parents, and teachers figured in multiple types of experiences. Crayola set out to learn more about these experiences, observing “in situ”—children in school and at home, teachers in the classroom, and parents (typically Mom) and caregivers interacting with children in various settings throughout the day.
Crayola engaged in direct observation of the customers in a broad range of creative play situations, paying particular attention to the broader context in which those situations occurred. They also conducted interviews subsequent to the observations that allowed for probing of specific actions or unexpected behaviors.9
When You Can’t Observe Directly
Although direct observation is a preferred approach, it isn’t always possible. In these situations, you can use other techniques to obtain observation-like data that can be evaluated just like those of an actual observation.
Exercises that place you in the shoes of the customer can be particularly effective. The goal is to experience and feel what the customer experiences and feels by doing it or using it yourself, in situ. These exercises can be structured around any portion of the customer experience, including both purchase and use. The important thing is to document the experience for further evaluation just as if it were an observation.
Another alternative to direct observation is to construct realistic customer experience scenarios. For example, anecdotes and stories from customers, customer service representatives, sales managers, channel partners, and others can easily be developed into more comprehensive scenarios. Build the anecdotes and stories into observation scenarios that can be “played back” during the analysis and insight extraction phase. Be sure to view each scenario as a discrete observation rather than as a composite or average of all experiences.
Analyzing the Data
Through the techniques we describe above, you will collect a rich and extensive set of observations for analysis. Now you can turn your attention to inferring unarticulated customer needs. We find three techniques to be particularly effective:
Identifying and resolving tensions
Customer experience mapping
Jobs to be done
Each of these approaches provides helpful ways of reaching beyond obvious and superficial needs to achieve a deeper understanding of unmet and unarticulated needs of customers (and noncustomers).
Identifying and Resolving Tensions
Observations often point to implicit tensions and trade-offs that might be productively resolved. These tensions can be internal to a single customer who is trading off between two things he or she cares about, or between different customers or stakeholders who have different and conflicting desires and objectives. They are rich areas to dig into to identify unarticulated needs.
Crayola noticed a number of unresolved tensions during their observations of mothers and children.10
Mom wanted her child to have a fun, engaging, and fulfilling “artistic experience”—as much as possible without limits as to where or when. At the same time, she wanted to prevent messes or damage from her child’s free-flowing behavior. As a result, she was reluctantly placing restrictions on where, when, and how art, coloring, or painting work was being done.
The child wanted to play without interruption or rules and to be “in control and self-directed.”
By understanding the tensions within and between what mother and child sought, Crayola achieved a eureka moment:
Mom wanted a mess-free, deeply immersive and rewarding artistic experience that her child could own and self-direct, without limitations as to where or when.
This insight was not previously appreciated. Crayola’s new understanding of mother and child color time—immersive without the limitations and without the risk of mess—emerged after deep consideration of what they had observed.11
Figure 2-1 provides a framework for surfacing and addressing tensions and trade-offs once you have the basic insight building blocks gathered from observations or other techniques.
Figure 2-1 Exploring Customer Tensions
Crayola resolved the mother-child tension by providing “fun and engaging” activities with their swath of new products that placed “no limits” and caused little or no mess. The company promoted their new line of products with new names or emphasis that included “erasable,” “mess-free,” and “washable” on the packaging.12
• • •
Industrial gas company Praxair provides another example of surfacing and resolving unresolved tensions. The company’s Grab ’n Go® all-in-one portable medical oxygen system resulted from observational research and immersive interviews during which Praxair and its suppliers surfaced the needs and frustrations of two important actors within a given hospital system13:
