What is innovation? Your gift of love to your customers …
I believe the three things below about innovation. If you believe the same things -- or aspire to them -- please sign up to be part of our Knowlecular Processes community.
FIRST, innovation is your gift of LOVE to your customers, in which you
1) hypothesize a vision of their future needs and wants,
2) express that vision in new offering prototypes,
3) test the prototypes with customers, iterating until a “win” is found,
4) and make it easy for them to attain the winning offering.
SECOND, profit is the difference between the value of an offering to the customer and the resources required to produce it. Profit is often measured in dollars, but to me it has a deeper fundamental than just making money. Profitable innovation delivers more value, with less resources.
THIRD, using well-defined processes, taking the right data -- sometimes taken in a very simple way, and using the data in relatively simple models or algorithms -- can dramatically increase your probability of producing a successful innovation stream for your customers. This will bring
greater customer delight and service
greater revenue
greater monetary profit
greater influence
Processes will make your innovation faster, better, more repeatable. It’s almost hard to imagine a modern manufacturing process that doesn’t track and control variables, costs, and production rates, and then use the recorded data in models or algorithms, to improve production or lower costs. In fact Google has done this for advertising, moving from “gut feel” to well-analyzed probabilities. And yet too often we innovate by “gut feel” or accident, requiring hard-to-find geniuses or heroic efforts. Why not try to innovate by process, so that YOU and your team can be the geniuses who does very meaningful work and serves your customer with love?
