Ongoing thoughts about innovation
I was intrigued with this quote from a 2008 article in the Harvard Business Review.
“The myth of creative genius is resilient: We believe that great ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. But what [innovative teams] accomplish is neither a sudden breakthrough nor the lightening strike of genius; it is the result of hard work augmented by creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement.”
- Tim Brown, Harvard Business Review Article on Design Thinking
I define innovation as any change in a process or service which creates incremental value for a customer. Notice the definition does not include any reference to technology. Technology by itself is not innovative unless applied to a process or service a customer cares about.
How do you know if something is innovative? Easy. Ask yourself, “Did this change create value for my customer?” The opposite of innovation is the status quo. I find it amusing that Ronald Regan defined “status quo” as Latin for “the mess we are in.” Which seems appropriate. Innovation always involves change.
So how do we create incremental value for customers? First we must know what our customers value. This takes a lot of face time and miles in their shoes to really understand where opportunities exist. We should look for ways to create new value. One way to do that is to remove friction from existing processes.
I have found that most innovations are relatively small incremental improvements that create some amount of incremental value for customers. But, they all originate from a deep, fundamental understanding of the customer. Add enough of them together, you get substantial customer value. Substantial customer value creates differentiation, competitive advantage, and customer loyalty.
Take the iPod, for example. We can agree it was innovative when it was first introduced, but was it the technology that made it innovative or the hundreds of little things that removed all the friction from using it related to the UI and the physical design?
Innovation is hard work and it starts with understanding what your customer values.
Your thoughts?
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