Here’s the real reason innovation is risky and messy and how to fix it.

If you have agreement about a problem and disagreement about the solution, then you have a problem.

But if you have disagreement about the problem and disagreement about the solution, then you have a mess.

The first step in problem-solving is to turn a mess into a problem by understanding and defining the problem. (A tip of the hat to the late great Wharton Professor, Russell Ackoff, for defining problem solving so succinctly).

That means the first step in innovation is to turn the mess into a problem by understanding and defining your target customers’ needs.

Innovation itself it not risky or messy. The way most organizations have been going about understanding their customers’ needs is risky and messy.

I have seen this hundreds of times and it still pains me because it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, 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.

Most organizations don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is under-served and where the big opportunities lie. It’s hard to differentiate and grow if you don’t know which of your target customers’ needs remain unmet.

What if you could:

1. Identify and rank all the opportunities – i.e., important unsatisfied needs – in your market with statistical validity?
2. And then evaluate each opportunity to select those that are most attractive to pursue based on your ability to address them and win in the market, be it through M&A, partnerships, messaging and position, operational alignment, or new product development?
3. And then devise solution ideas with confidence because you know exactly what your target customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success. Could that change the game for you?

This is the way to unclog the new product development pipeline (because only ideas that address an important unsatisfied need enter development), reduce the number of iterations in development, quicken time to market, and turn innovation and growth into a repeatable business process.

If you want to achieve growth that you have never achieved before, you must do something you have never done before. Reveal needs, create value, drive growth. I can show you how.

Learn more about how we execute the Jobs-to-be-Done innovation approach to consistently deliver results here.

Schedule a free discovery call with me here.