Why People Don’t Want to Buy Your Products and Services Nobody wants to buy your products or services or mine; they want to acquire value. Customers measure value by how well a product or service helps them get their functional, emotional, and social jobs done. Products and services are just the tools people “hire” to ...

Focus: the Key to Success Knowing where to focus is the key to success at innovation. “Focus…means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas…You have to pick carefully…Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.” – Steve Jobs But how do you pick the one best idea among hundreds? What constitutes a “good idea?” First and ...

How to Stay Relevant in Turbulent Times Due to the disruption from coronavirus, many of our societal institutions – companies, schools, non-profits, and government – are scrambling to develop flexible hybrid value delivery platforms, that is, ways to deliver their value through face-to-face platforms and online. Innovation skills are more important now than ever. Yet, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...