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Innovation Means Looking Beyond
What is to What Could Be
By Jim Clemmer
Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking,
and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's
future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top
performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful
science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or
-- even worse -- commodity products and services that compete only on
price.
Market share, for example, is only meaningful if you're in a stable, contained,
and well defined market. Fat chance of that today as markets merge, converge,
and diverge. In our turbulent markets with such high levels of flux, market
share measurements can easily distract you from creating whole new product
or service categories, markets, or even industries. How good an indicator
of future success was market share, customer satisfaction, and quality
levels if you were a horse-pulled carriage maker in 1912?
Many innovations come from a deeper level of customer and market understanding.
They go beyond what current customers say they need. They solve problems
that customers either don't realize they have or didn't know could be
solved. These innovations create needs and performance gaps only once
customers start using them and get turned on to the possibilities. For
example, in the early eighties, no focus group, survey, or customer satisfaction
measure could have shown a big demand for fax machines, lap top computers,
or cellular phones.
Every product and service we now take for granted was once silly, interesting,
or just an odd curiosity. What would you have said to a market researcher
asking about a video machine for your TV when there were few movies to
rent? How about CD players when there were no CDs to buy? What about a
bank card to withdraw cash from an ATM? How about a personal computer?
Walk in Your Customer's Shoes
Innovation is a hands-on issue. It calls for an intimate understanding
of current customers and markets, potential new customers or markets,
team and organization competencies and improvement opportunities, vision,
values, and mission. You can't develop that intimacy from a distance.
Studies, reports, surveys, graphs, and measurements wouldn't give it to
you. Effective innovation depends on disciplined management systems and
processes. But it starts with people. People searching for creative ways
to do things better, different, or more effectively. People trying to
understand how other people use, or could use, the products or services
their organization could produce. That makes innovation a critical leadership
issue.
Beyond the management tools of surveys, focus groups, and the like, innovation
leaders find a multitude of ways to live in their customers' world. They're
learning how to learn from the market, not just market research. Innovation
leaders look for ways to align the organization's product and service
development competencies with latent or unexpressed market and customer
needs. Since customers don't know what's possible, they often can't identify
innovations that break with familiar patterns. At the other extreme, leaders
recognize that their organizations are constantly in danger of developing
products and services with little or no market appeal. So many new (or
extended) products and services come from empathic innovation. These are
innovations that flow from a deep empathy and understanding of the intended
customers' problems and aspirations.
Innovation Pathways
There are as many ways to innovate as there are potentially new products
and services. Here are a few insights and ideas:
| • |
Make sure the "voice of the market" pervades every part
of your organization. Bring customers into your company offices and
plants for visits, joint problem solving and planning sessions, celebrations,
focus groups, conferences, barbecues, presentations, and the like.
Get everyone in your organization out to see customers or into the
real world on a regular basis. |
| • |
Don't allow any manager, technical specialist, or support professional
(such as accountants, marketers, or human resource staff) to participate
in product, service, or market development decisions unless they're
spending a minimum of 25% of their time with current or prospective
customers and partners in the market. |
| • |
Make your senior managers responsible for at least some business
development and ongoing customer service. They should be spending
25 - 35 percent or more of their time with customers (the same amount
of time should also be spent with external and internal partners).
Don't allow senior managers to only cost cut and quality control their
way to profitability and performance bonuses. Make sure it's balanced
with innovation and growth. |
| • |
The people selling in your target markets and serving your customers
are innovating every day to meet unexpected needs, beat out a competitor,
or capitalize on a new opportunity. Unless you have a user friendly,
easy process (not an administrative bureaucracy) for gathering all
that experience and market intelligence, you're squandering one of
your organization's richest sources of innovation. |
| • |
Identify your leading-edge external customers and partners and bring
them into your product and service development processes. Ideally,
these are customers and partners who extensively use your products
and services. But they keep pushing everything and everybody to the
limit. They are always looking for new and better ways to use your
products and services. Find out what problems they're trying to solve
that no one else in your market provides solutions for. |
| • |
Establish active user and support networks. Provide regular face-to-face,
electronic, print, or audio-video forums to help customers, external
partners (like distributors and suppliers), and internal partners
exchange experiences, ideas, and problems solve. Capture and disseminate
all this learning throughout your organization. |
Keep asking your customers and partners (internal and external)
lots of "what if..." questions. Ensure the answers are circulated
throughout your organization. Don't allow anybody to write all this off
as just wishful thinking. Remind them that somebody's wishful thinking
brought us every service and product we use today, developed our modern
economy, and gave us one of the richest lifestyles in history. Innovation
leaders find ways to translate wishful thinking into the "logical
and obvious" products and services we eventually take for granted.
| Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally
acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management
team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams,
and personal growth. During the last 25 years he has delivered over
two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats.
Jim's five international bestselling books include The VIP Strategy,
Firing
on All Cylinders, Pathways
to Performance, Growing
the Distance, and The
Leader's Digest. His web site is www.clemmer.net.
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