Do You Have an Innovation or New Product Development Process?
What’s the difference between an innovation and a new product development process?
A good innovation process brings clarity and precision to the “fuzzy front end” so your team can consistently generate winning new product and service ideas ready for development. It will reliably fill your pipeline with good ideas. A good innovation process should master the front end of innovation by gaining actionable insights about your target customers’ unmet needs. This enables teams to consistently generate truly good ideas to go into the new product development process.
In traditional brainstorming, to establish psychological safety and foster creativity, facilitators often encourage the idea that “there is no such thing as a bad idea.” But is that really true? No. Any idea that does not address a known (validated), important, yet unsatisfied need is by definition a bad idea because it is doomed to fail. If an idea is not addressing a known important unsatisfied need, then it is addressing an unimportant and/or already satisfied need. Why waste your time and resources generating, testing, and developing a lot of bad ideas when you don’t have to?
I remember facilitating just such a brainstorming session for a client years ago. It was fun for everyone, built teamwork and, hey, we generated 38 ideas! Yet, when I talked with the executive sponsor about six months later, he told me they had not acted on one of them. Why? Because they didn’t know which ideas were important to the target customer. Ugh.
A better definition of a “good” idea is one that addresses a validated, important, yet unsatisfied need, and is attractive to pursue. This can and should be determined before generating ideas. Then, and only then, are truly “good” ideas being generated.
Validating the market need before generating product or service solution ideas also enables the product development team to experiment on the efficacy of the solution alone. If you do not validate the market need first, you will conflate two experiments: one testing the market need and the other testing the efficacy of the solution which, of course, impedes learning. By validating the market need first, the team can reduce the number of product iterations and shorten the time to market. First, discover your target customers’ unmet needs and then generate solution ideas to address them. Doing this work upfront dramatically increases success rates from 25% to over 80%.
This process is what Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison did: they identified what their target customers wanted to accomplish before generating ideas and solutions. Today, with the advent of the Jobs-to-Be-Done innovation approach, you don’t have to be a genius to consistently develop winning new offerings.
Most companies don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is under-served, about where the best opportunities lie. Knowing where to focus your creativity makes all the difference in the world. You deserve to know what your customers want before you generate ideas. Innovation should never be a guessing game.
