Anthony Ulwick: What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
Strategyn's goal is to create a global standard for innovation. Read this book and discover why.
Simon Knox and Stan Maklan: Competing on Value: Bridging the Gap Between Brand and Customer Value (FT S.)
Book provides The UOVP – Unique Organisation Value Proposition - an important new methodology providing a practical approach to define and deliver customer value in a world where traditional products and brands often fail to do so.
Mitchell and Goffin: Innovation Management : Strategy and Implementation using the Pentathlon Framework
Great synthesis of innovation and strategy management though with a product and service bias
John Hagel III and John Seely Brown: The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization
Good on evolving strategy-making processes and capabilities in an inter-firm context, yet little on customer integration
Denzil Meyers: Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity Are Changing the World of Brands
Really good collection of brand-centric views on changing firm-stakeholder dynamics
Henry Mintzberg: The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning
A classic.
Clayton M. Christensen: Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
More academic than The Innovators Solution yet still worth the effort
Clayton M. Christensen: The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
C. K. Prahalad and Ramaswamy: The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers
This is an important book. Describes the impact of co-creation on branding, marketing, KM, Org Learning, IT Management, Management and Strategy - and of course the changing nature of value itself
Microsoft has used Outcome-Driven Innovation on over 35 projects. Here is a case-study of how Strategyn and ODI was successfully deployed to grow revenues and customer satisfaction in its poorly-performing Software Assurance business.
Download Microsoft_Software_Assurance_CaseStudy
This paper by Tony Ulwick, Strategyn provides a summary of the Strategyn Outcome-Driven Innovation method, describing 8 key discoveries that define the approach. These are:
1. When it comes to innovation, the job, not the product, must be the unit of analysis.
2. The proper definition of “customer need” becomes clear when the job is the unit of analysis.
3. A job map provides the structure needed to ensure all customer needs are captured.
4. Concept innovation and design innovation are two different things, but can be addressed similarly.
5. The opportunity algorithm makes it possible to prioritize unmet needs.
6. Opportunities (which needs are unmet) dictate which market growth paths to pursue.
7. Scattershot brainstorming doesn’t work; sequenced and focused idea generation does.
8. Ideas can be evaluated with precision when all the needs are known.
Download An Introduction to Outcome-Driven Innovation Strategyn UK 2009 (.pdf)
Here is an excerpt:
1. When it comes to innovation, the job, not the product, must be the unit of analysis.
Today, most companies support the theory that customers buy products and services for a specific purpose: to get jobs done. A job is defined as the fundamental goals customers are trying to accomplish or problems they are trying to solve in a given situation. Making the job the unit of analysis is the cornerstone of the outcome-driven innovation philosophy. From the customer’s perspective, it is the job that is the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centered because the job’s perfect execution reflects the customer’s true definition of value. Current products and services are merely point-in-time solutions that enable customers to execute jobs. They should not be the focal point for value creation. A vinyl record, a CD, and an MP3 storage unit, for example, all help customers accomplish the job of storing music. Focusing on creating a better record doesn’t help in the creation of the CD or the MP3 device, but focusing on improving the job of storing music supports the discovery and creation of new ways to help customers get the job done better. This thinking, which we developed in the mid-1990s, has been widely cited and publicized by academics such as Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and others in many articles and books. Accepting the job as the primary unit of analysis has important downstream ramifications: companies must stop thinking that customer needs somehow relate to the use of a product or service and instead must understand that needs relate to how well the customer is getting a job done. Figuring out how to help customers get a job done better or helping them get other or new jobs done is the real goal of innovation.
2. The proper definition of “customer need” becomes clear when the job is the unit of analysis.
Because customers buy products to help get jobs done, if companies want to improve an existing product or to create a new product, they must figure out where the customer struggles in the execution of a specific job and then devise ways to help the customer. This means that companies must analyze the job of interest and ascertain from customers what must be measured and controlled to ensure the job is executed with the speed, predictability and output customers desire. The metrics customers use to measure the successful execution of a job are what we call the customers’ desired outcomes; they are customer needs. A corn farmer, for example, may want to “minimize the time it takes for the corn seeds to germinate” or to “increase the percent of plants that emerge at the same time.” When trying to help customers get a job done better, companies must find out which outcomes customers are dissatisfied with and then devise solutions that address the problems. This is where the term outcome-driven innovation originates. These metrics can be uncovered using any of the popular interviewing methods, e.g., personal interviews, focus groups, ethnographic interviews, etc.
I run the UK office of Strategyn and with our growing team, are delivering ODI projects in UK, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and Iberia.
If you have a question or comments on the paper, do drop me a note...
Download An Introduction to Outcome-Driven Innovation Strategyn UK 2009 (.pdf)
Based on an extensive analysis of the academic co-creation literature and my previous work into market-learning capabilities, in this paper i provide a conceptual framework of processes and capabilities for customer knowledge co-creation.
Download On customer knowledge co-creation and dynamic capabilities…(.pdf)
Yours free to download and share....
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