Four personalities that determine innovation success or failure
Innovation, done right, is an interactive flow of diverse contributions. For sure, it is a process of building on the knowledge, perspectives and heuristics of multiple people. It’s in this diversity where novel solutions emerge. But there’s another aspect to it. Think of innovation as a multi-act play. One in which distinct personalities enter the […]
Will customers adopt your innovation? Hope, fear and jobs-to-be-done
When will a customer decide your innovative product or service is worth adopting? It’s a question that marketers, strategists and others spend plenty of time thinking about. The factors are myriad and diverse. In this post, let’s examine two primary elements that influence both if an innovation will be adopted, and when it would happen: Decision weights assigned […]
Why crowdsourcing works
Crowdsourcing is a method of solving problems through the distributed contributions of multiple people. It’s used to address tough problems that happen everyday. Ideas for new opportunities. Ways to solve problems. Uncovering an existing approach that addresses your need. Time and again, crowdsourcing has been used successfully to solve challenges. But…why does it work? What’s […]
The Folly of Inside-Out Product Thinking
Inside out just doesn’t fit right Ever run into this deductive reasoning? Customers like our existing products and our company We are building a new product that reflects the priorities of a company executive Therefore, customers will like our new product It’s a clear violation of the First Law of Product: Customers decide what products they […]
10 examples of fabulously flawed product-first thinking
In talking about jobs-to-be-done here, I sometimes think that all I’m doing is stating the obvious. I mean, isn’t it obvious that you’d create something that helped fulfill a need or desire? What else would you do? But I’ve seen in my own work experience, and across a multitude of initiatives in other industries, cases […]
Latent needs are overplayed as an innovation dynamic
Reading this thought piece from the Silicon Valley Product Group, The End of Requirements, I saw this point about latent needs: Unrealized needs (also called “latent needs”) are those solutions where customers may not even be aware they even have the need until after they see and experience the solution. Examples include digital video recorders, […]
Generate opportunity maps with customer jobs-to-be-done
In seeking to better understand customer jobs-to-be-done, I found myself a bit underarmed. Meaning, I didn’t really have a way to do this. The value of jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) thinking has only emerged recently. It’s still nascent, and there aren’t ready guideposts to follow. However, Tony Ulwick has been at it over two decades. Indeed, his […]
The Vendor Opportunity Gap in The Future of Wok
The bulk of what I do entails working with large (and some mid size) organizations on helping them understand and then adapt to the changes we are seeing around the future of work and collaboration. Part of this means understanding what’s happening on the technology side of things which is one of the reasons why […]
Awarding Enterprise Adoption of Cloud Computing
One of the longest-running criticisms of enterprise cloud computing is the dearth of publicly referenceable implementation case studies. Thankfully, this is starting to change. Indicators such as speaking at industry events and talking to reporters about what works and what doesn’t in cloud migration suggest that enterprises are starting to open up and share. There […]
Truth about the SAP HCM Customer Connection Program
In February of 2012, SAP announced that it was replacing the defunct Development Request (DRQ) process, which had long been ineffective, with a new ASUG support Customer Connection Program. The programs goal was to allow customers to submit smaller improvements, and assuming they got the minimum support of five other customers, that SAP would review, […]
Finding opportunities to unseat incumbents
On Quora, this question was asked: Competition: How do you assess the value of a new product or service vs an incumbent’s? Is there a starting set of criteria? eg. price, quantity provided, ease of use, breadth and so on. I’m thinking specifically of a product to supply financial news and information and prices. What […]
A Method for Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to Product and Service Design
Say you’re designing something new for a product or service. Of course, you have your own ideas for what to do. But, how informed are you really about what is needed? This is a question I faced in thinking about game mechanics used in a social platform. A common product approach is to work up […]
The Shift has hit the Fan – Microsoft, Facebook Slides, Google Rises
In what seems to be from the lower paleothic period but in fact was about a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about the Mean Girls phenomenon and Shakespeare. This in turn was not actually about mean girls or Henry IV, but about the interesting relationship of…
What’s your view on customers’ value to innovation?
More and more, customer-centricity is becoming a thing. As in, an increasingly important philosophy to companies in managing day-to-day and even longer term planning. In comes in different forms: design thinking, social CRM, service-dominant logic, value co-creation. But it’s not pervasive at this point. Companies still are spotty on how much they integrate customers into their processes. […]
Book review–Kill the Company
I seem to be on the mailing list for book publishers wanting people to read and review new business tomes – that’s not such a bad thing – I get a heap of literature and a great way to expand my library. The most recent review copy I was sent was Kill the Company by […]
