Innovation and Creativity are Different Innovation and creativity are different. Innovation brings the target customers’ unmet needs and the company’s solution capabilities into the same room. Creativity then makes connections and generates winning ideas. Unless your innovation process discovers and ranks target customers’ unmet needs and then brings good solution capabilities to bear upon them, your ...

How to Differentiate, Innovate and Grow With Confidence If you want to differentiate, innovate and grow with a new product success rate > 80%, then listen to this lively podcast in which Gary Monti of the Center Managing Change interviews Urko about the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) innovation process. There is a lot more to JTBD than ...

Why Your Business Needs a “Customer Analysis” to Beat the Competition Most leaders agree that obtaining competitive information is essential for developing an effective strategy. Gaining competitive intelligence is often viewed as similar to gaining military intelligence. The big difference, however, is that in capitalism we are fighting to earn the business of customers. In ...

How to Validate a New Offering People Don’t Know They Need Contrary to popular opinion, it is not good science to run experiments by testing minimally viable products to discover customer needs and validate the solution. Why? Because this conflates two experiments and can invalidate both. In good science, the customer need is validated first, ...

To Be Innovative, You Must Look into the Future Definition of a market: “A market is a place where two parties can gather to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.” — Investopedia Notice that this definition is based on existing products and services. It should be no surprise then that many executives try to size the ...

3 Lessons Leaders Can Learn from Physicians 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 ...

Could This Change the Game for You? Are you tired of implementing growth initiatives that don’t work? Did you know that the number one cause for new product and new business failure is misunderstanding customers’ needs? This has been the case for decades, but it is totally unnecessary today. You don’t have to play a “game of ...

What 3 Clients Have in Common What do an online university, an off-road vehicle manufacturer, and a yearbook publisher have in common? For one, all of them were clients of ours in 2019. We are grateful for their trust and the “word of mouth” referrals that brought them to us. We have enjoyed the collaboration ...

Why Most Innovators are Just “Flailing Faster” and What to Do About It Over 25 million copies of the late Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, have been sold. It remains a best-seller three decades after it was first published (1989). The second habit of highly effective people is to “begin ...

The First Step in Adapting to a Changed Market Given the forced shutdowns that most businesses are experiencing now due to the Coronavirus, it is essential that leaders adapt to make the most of the situation. That means understanding what parts of your business are essential and what parts can be changed or let go. To ...