Successful innovators don't just launch products and hope for the best. They actively look for customer insights, understand the problem to be solved, quickly find solutions, validate ideas through experiments, and scale what works. The Innovator's Method provides a structured process for innovation that works in both startups and established organizations, whether selling to external or internal customers. New tools like lean startup, design thinking and agile development help entrepreneurs, designers and developers validate ideas characterized by high uncertainty through rapid, low-cost experimentation. This is revolutionizing how managers bring new offerings to market. The Innovator's Method is an end-to-end process for creating, refining and launching ideas that leverages these approaches. It helps you carry out insight gathering, problem definition, solution finding, validation through testing, and scaling in a systematic way.
Innovation begins with insights about consumer needs and problems worth solving. Valuable innovations solve real issues that customers face. To generate these insights, we must go beyond business as usual and typical customer research. The seeds of innovation often come from surprises—observations that challenge our assumptions. Consider a few examples: Michael Dell wondered why off-the-shelf personal computers cost so much more than their components. Intuit studied agricultural markets and found extreme day-to-day price fluctuations that created uncertainty for farmers. Jeff Bezos realized that mail order catalogs omitted books, despite their suitability for online retail. In each case, a surprise led innovators to identify overlooked problems and opportunities. We can systematize surprise-driven insight generation with simple behavioral changes. Talk to unfamiliar customers and experts, examine analogous markets, and scrutinize our own organizations. These discoveries will inevitably yield surprises that can spark creative questioning. Why do we see x when we expected to see y? How might we resolve this disconnect? The challenge lies in determining which surprises warrant further investigation. Insights must lead to ideas that create real value. We need quick, low-cost ways to validate ideas without overinvesting in dead ends. An idea vote allows customers and colleagues to weigh in on the most promising concepts. Rapid prototypes test key assumptions and collect real-world data on an idea’s viability. For example, when Google executive Marissa Mayer doubted the value of contextual online ads, engineer Paul Buchheit created a prototype to demonstrate their relevance. His AdSense concept now generates over $10 billion annually. Of course, not every idea pans out. True innovation requires exploring many options under conditions of uncertainty. Leonard Schleifer, CEO of biopharmaceutical firm Regeneron, cautions against overfocusing resources on a single concept. Rather, organizations should pursue multiple experiments to identify the most viable directions. Let data guide the allocation of further time and money. In the end, customers determine the worth of innovations in the marketplace. But as Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer emphasize, innovators should not rely on customers to design solutions. Instead, innovators must take responsibility for insight generation, while customers validate proposed ideas through feedback and purchase decisions. If current behaviors yield no surprises, we must change our approaches to spark new insights. Systematically capturing surprises allows us to reveal overlooked opportunities and problems worth solving.
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