How to Create Winning New Ideas Some people think that startup and new product/service ideas are worthless. That may be true for most of the ideas that come out of traditional brainstorming sessions but there’s been tremendous progress made in our ability to consistently create high value ideas with the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) process. Motorola, for ...

The Right Kind of Wrong Professor Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School makes some good distinctions about the various kinds of failures we all have experienced at work in her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. This caught my attention because the “fail fast and often” mantra has ...

Why Your Customer-Centric Strategy Might Be Failing: A JTBD Perspective Most organizations aspire to be customer-centric. They sincerely want to prioritize their customers’ needs in all aspects of the business. Yet, they often fall short. Why? There are a lot of challenges companies face to become customer-centric but one stands out above all others: how ...

How to Make Products and Services that People Love

Why “Increasing Risk Tolerance” as a Growth Strategy is a Bad Idea “Without sustaining the practice of innovation, no company can excel – or survive.” –  A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan, “The Game Changer” Many leaders recognize the importance of innovation but find it difficult. Too often, it seems like a random haphazard event that ...

The Creativity Myth: Why Focus Beats Ideas for Innovation Maybe you know, it’s hard for many organizations to stand out from the competition and grow. To differentiate and grow is especially hard for organizations in complex markets because they don’t know which of the target customers’ needs remain unmet by their own offerings and their ...