Innovation Navigator - logical and proven innovation process you can use

BOSTON - Oct. 16, 2016 - PRLog -- Through most of my consulting career I have been starting my lectures and sales pitches from an old graph of technology development life cycle...

The main message and a long term mission statement that went along with this picture were about need to improve efficiency, shorten the time, and deal with tremendous need for capital. As a practitioner in the field I was trying to work with my clients to fix this troublesome process one step at a time. I have been doing lots of strategy advisement and technology scouting to bypass the first few deep dives of the curve above. I have been working with universities and many startups to speed up the hockey stick and push for commercialization. But only after a year of teaching I came to an understanding of the whole process and happy to offer my support and an incredible new tool for innovation management.

Apparently there is no "buy" and "sell" side of the innovation... there is also not much of a difference between startups, individual entrepreneurs and large companies that want to innovate or survive by innovation and grow. Everybody needs the Innovation Navigator^TM!

I believe that the funnel and stage gates models of innovation are limited at best. I am not afraid to say that they are plain wrong as they focus on pushing an idea (invention, discovery, technology...) through loops and hoops of development without any idea if it could or better say should be successful. As decades and centuries before - most of the so called innovation is still a "solution in search of the problem". In my opinion, it is a worse case of gambling. It is worse than gambling! While gambling we at least rely on statistics that is sort of objective and impartial. But in those innovation games we purposely push our luck with biases and cargo cult meditation ("this is how everybody does it - it must be true"...). No surprise that lots of players in this game are at loss. Many large companies in various industries have no idea where their next success will come from. There are no new sources of ideas, and the internal R&D is too slow and too expensive. And on the other side of the spectrum - startups are trying to prove to VCs that they know what they are doing when many of them simply trying to make sense of some great invention or "make a world a better place". We all know these symptoms.

When I started my own consultancy four years ago, I announced this principle of Primary Care Consulting that will be preventing "diseases" of innovation, not just treating symtoms, doing post mortem analysis or life support.

So here is what I see as my solution and what I offer as a new Innovation Navigator^TM service:

1. Innovation is a process (versus invention/discovery etc that are events) that could be managed in a controlled repeatable fashion with a Customer Need as a core;

2. Needs can not be invented or pushed on customer! They are real and exists right now to be discovered and formulated;

3. Customers are people who will pay for a need solution (not to mix up with end-users!). Customers themselves could hardly formulate their Needs because of the biases [step one in The Navigator offering covers Needs identification and formulation cleared of bias - data driven, interviews and literature based, plus internal, proprietary data set of needs];

4. Needs consist from Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) that customers already trying to resolve using competing approaches/technologies. Identifying, describing and qualifying these jobs is a critical step in the innovation process! [step two in The Navigator^TM];

5. The data of JTBD always result in a pivot of the Need and are extremely specific to the customer. Customers ARE the market. As it is usually equally complicated to solve "small" Need as a "large" one - we better make sure than the market we choose is big enough to worth it a while [step three in The Navigator];

6. The Need and its JTBD have specific set of criteria, measurables and expected outcomes. Only after figuring all of this out we can start talking about a solution! Different types of ideation techniques, technology scouting, coursing and R&D start here [step four of The Navigator^TM - former "buy side" services or "Open Innovation" tools]

7. Customer feedback, business models, commercialization strategy become part of the process at this stage and also result in multiple pivots back to the Need and JTBDs [step five - market validation, competitive analysis, commercialization support].

Those seven steps and corresponding five services should ideally form multiple feedback loops thus creating a Real Innovation Process. Whatever will result from such a process is bound to succeed. May be not in the first cycle... but eventually! And this is much more than any other of the existing models could promise.

I do not think that I am the only one who figured this out - most if not all of the pieces have been discussed one way or another both in the literature and in practice. But I have not seen anybody offering to support this process step by step like I do! I can also teach how to build and manage this process internally.

The Navigator^TM could be used "turn by turn" (fixed fee or hourly based on the scope) or "all the way" (annual or subscription based).

I know it should work! I saw it works! Let's discuss where and how YOU need to Navigate! I have the Innovation Navigator^TM for you.

www.linkedin.com/in/eugenebuff