A key factor for your organization!

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” –Steve Jobs

In the world of technology, innovation is a key factor in driving success and growth. Not innovation for its own sake, but innovation that brings about customer value.  In fact, innovation that does not return customer value is often costly in that you will burn valuable resources (opportunity cost) developing that innovation to not receive real benefit.

I have also found that innovation rarely happens by chance. It’s a forced action.

What I ask of my product management teams at the start of any new project is to purposely identify where the innovation exists in the product. This requires the product managers to look for and deliver innovation. Products without some customer-centric innovation rarely pass Gate 0 (more about gate development processes in a future blog).

Where do the best ideas for product innovation come from? 

Your customers!

Customers are unlikely to lay the innovation idea at your feet, or even be aware of any innovation. Good product managers ask customers questions, especially around their needs and wants. When product managers can identify customer pain points or challenges the customer is experiencing, well that is pure gold.  

Add customer-centric innovation to your products and make it part of your culture.

Using what they learn from the customers, product managers can look for innovative solutions to address their needs / wants or cure their pain point / challenge.  Sometimes the innovation comes from taking an existing solution and adding innovation to create a unique and even more customer-valuable product.

The key is to make innovation part of your development culture!  Once it becomes part of the culture, your teams are always on the lookout! Once the product is in development and innovation is engrained in the culture, your development teams may be able to find additional innovation.  It becomes infectious in a good way!

Need help finding the innovation or in driving an innovation culture?

At Williams Apex Advisors, using our Innovation Workshops Service, we work with your product and development teams in not only discovering innovation through customer-focused collaborative workshops where we will identify your current state of innovation, help the team find innovation, and then help the team begin to instill a culture of innovation.

There are also other innovations not specifically product innovation, but still important to your company and to your success.  Those innovations are your processes, your strategies, sales tactics, and market approach.  We can also help you with finding and implementing those innovations.

To find out more about this service, click here.