Isn’t It Time to Turn Innovation Into a Repeatable Business Process?

March 2, 2023
Urquhart Wood

Isn’t It Time to Turn Innovation Into a Repeatable Business Process?

Did you know that 97% of all patents never make any money?

That’s primarily because they fail to deliver any meaningful value to customers.

An invention is only an innovation when it delivers new value to a customer.

Some people say, “Innovation is the conversion of an invention into revenue and profit.”

That’s helpful because it emphasizes the importance of creating something people will pay for, but the focus and process is all wrong. Trying to invent things and then convert them into revenue and profit will ensure high failure rates.

Instead, shift your focus to understanding how you can help your target customers get their jobs done better.

When a company knows what type of information to obtain from its customers and how to get it, converting their unmet needs into great ideas is remarkably easy. And then converting those great ideas into revenue and profit is much easier, too, because you will know what customers are trying to accomplish and how they measure success.

“I find out what the world needs.

Then I go ahead and try to invent it.”

– Thomas A. Edison

Edison understood the importance of sequencing for successful innovation: first discover your target customers’ unmet needs and then generate solution ideas to address them. Edison only conducted his famous thousands of experiments after he found out what the world needed.

Most companies don’t lack creativity or ideas; they lack focus. They lack clarity about where the market is under-served, where the unmet needs lie, where the best opportunities lie. They don’t know what type of information to obtain from customers or how to get it.

So that’s what we reveal, with precision, using the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) approach, so that clients know where to focus and what to do to create winning new and improved offerings in a predictable manner – and with a greater likelihood for breakthrough innovation.

Isn’t it time to turn your innovation and growth efforts into a repeatable business process?

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