In a 2016 McKinsey poll, 84% of global executives acknowledged that innovation is extremely important to growth strategy, yet only a mere 6% are satisfied with their performance, and very few know what to do about it. Here are three things that leaders can do about it, three things we can learn from physicians to help turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process that dramatically increases success rates.

1. Understand each party’s role

The patients’ role is to communicate the results they want best they can. The physicians’ role is to determine what treatment plan will best deliver those results. It is not the patients’ role to come up with treatments, and it is not the physicians’ role to dictate what the patient wants to accomplish, feel or experience from treatment. They each have their own role and expertise.

Collaboration works best when everyone on the team knows the role, expertise and contribution each person is expected to provide. Just getting this right will improve collaboration and increase innovation success rates.

2. First diagnose, then treat

Studies have shown again and again that the #1 cause of new product failure is misunderstanding the customers’ needs. Some experts declare that, of all the new businesses that fail, 90% fail due to misunderstanding customers’ needs (1).

Physicians understand that to be effective, they must conduct a diagnosis to inform the development of the treatment plan. To not conduct a diagnosis before treatment could be considered medical malpractice. Yet, as Professor Clayton Christensen has observed, many companies are committing marketing malpractice because they launch new offerings before understanding their customers’ needs and, not surprisingly, fail.

Like every good algebra teacher, physicians know that if you first solve for x (determine the customer’s needs) then you can consistently solve for y (develop an effective solution). Good science requires understanding the problem first, then developing the solution. This is how Thomas Edison executed innovation. He confirmed the market needs first, then experimented with various solutions to address them (2). He did not conflate two different experiments by trying to identify customer needs and the efficacy of a solution at the same time.

3. Know what information to obtain and how to get it

Generally, doctors know what questions to ask and what tests to take to get the information they need to make a diagnosis. In business, the key information that innovators must obtain to conduct an accurate “customer diagnosis” are:

1. The functional, emotional and social jobs that customers want to get done
2. The criteria they use to measure success when executing those job(s)
3. Where in the process they struggle given their current solutions

Defining customer needs as “the jobs customers want to get done and the criteria they use to measure success” helps us avoid confusing product solutions with customer needs, from confusing “drills” with “making holes.”

Because patients’ and customers’ needs are complex, people often don’t know how to articulate them. But this does not mean they cannot tell us; it means we must know in advance what type of customer inputs to capture and how to obtain them.

Most companies don’t know how to do this so, naturally, they resort to rapid prototyping (trial and error) to figure out customer needs. Rapid prototyping is an excellent practice after the target customers’ important unsatisfied needs have been validated because then experiments can be run on the solution’s efficacy alone. This facilitates faster learning.

Innovation teams that know how to capture the right customer information to make an accurate diagnosis can focus their creativity where they know it will create value, and this makes all the difference in the world. It’s like an X-ray of the customer’s experience.

Just as the old adage goes, “A problem well-defined is half-solved,” so too, “A customer need well-defined is half-satisfied.” The best creativity trigger is a well-defined customer need.

This is how leading companies are turning innovation and growth into a repeatable business process that consistently delivers 2 – 5 times higher success rates than industry averages.

Footnotes:

1 – Nathan Furr and Phil Ahlstrom. Nail It Then Scale It, p. 27

2 – Dyer, Frank Lewis. Edison, His Life and Inventions. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1910): 42