Execute Innovation and Creativity Will Happen
Most people think that innovation and creativity are essentially the same thing. And, for normal everyday conversations, that’s fine.
But if you’re responsible for developing winning new products and services, you must make some distinctions. Otherwise, your innovation efforts will continue to be hit-or-miss.
If you want to turn innovation into a repeatable business process, then you must execute it in two steps and in the right sequence: first, discover your target customers’ unmet needs and then devise solution ideas to address them.
Note that the first step – discovering your target customers’ unmet needs – has nothing to do with creativity; it’s a market research function. Yet, it is essential if you want to give your team the focus it needs to be successful with its creativity.
That means that, before the team attempts to generate any ideas, the firm must:
- Capture a comprehensive set of customer needs in the target market
- Determine which needs are important and unsatisfied (i.e., opportunities for innovation and growth)
- Evaluate and select which opportunities are most attractive to pursue for new value creation based on how well the firm can address them and win.
Firms that do this preparatory work before ideation dramatically increase their creativity, effectiveness, and success rates because they know where to focus and what to do to create unique value for their target customers.
Creativity happens when the team is given the focus it needs. Just as a problem well-defined is half-solved, a customer need well-defined is half-satisfied. A well-defined customer need is the best creativity trigger.
If you don’t identify your target customers’ unmet needs before generating ideas then you will inevitably waste time and money pursuing unimportant and/or already well satisfied needs. That’s what most organizations do and it’s a key reason why their innovation success rates remain stubbornly low.
Innovation itself is not inherently risky and messy; the way most organizations are executing innovation is inherently risky and messy.
I’ve see this hundreds of times and it still pains me because it doesn’t have to be this way; it’s a fixable problem.
Any organization that knows what type of customer information to obtain, how to get it, and how to use it can flip the script, change the game, and achieve dramatically better results. You can, too.
Get game-changing customers insights, innovate, and grow. We can show you how.
