Stephen Wunker: Steps to Put Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done Theory into Practice

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Nine of the ten most valuable companies in America can trace their greatness to reconceiving a market’s boundaries.  From ExxonMobil to Apple to Wal-Mart, these firms expanded markets that others saw as static.  How can companies in today’s economy – seemingly hemmed in on all sides by hyper-competitive markets – break into new ground?

The wrong place to start is by asking customers what they want.  Overwhelmingly, customers will answer based on how a market exists today.  As Henry Ford reputedly said of his industry, “If I asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”  Instead, you need to look deeper and examine underlying needs.

Clayton Christensen, the famed Harvard Business School Professor known for coining the term “disruptive innovation,” believes that one of his most enduring legacies will be an idea he first put forward in his 2003 book The Innovator’s Solution: don’t sell products and services to customers, but rather try to help people address their jobs-to-be-done.  This seemingly simple idea has profound implications for re-framing industries.  As I saw in years of consulting with Christensen to companies giant and small, it can revolutionize how firms compete.  But the concept can also be tough to put into practice.  A six-step process provides a rigorous way of defining the jobs you can address.  Once those challenges are tightly defined, it is much easier to generate bold ideas for new solutions.

1.  What are the high-level jobs-to-be-done?

Rather than looking just at what people buy, examine the needs that arise during their lives.  Sometimes the job is much broader than the product or service that is bought.  For instance, why did I take five small children to a movie on Sunday afternoon?  Because on a rainy day I needed to get them out of house for a few hours.  Could movie theaters expand their addressable market by emphasizing how they can occupy kids?  What if the room used for the 20^th screen was adapted instead for inexpensive play like a childrens’ gym?

2.  What are the current approaches and what pain points result?

Jobs-to-be-done can sprawl across dozens of industry categories.  Clearly a company can’t address each job, but by looking broadly it can re-define its true “competition.”  After it understands the full landscape, it can focus narrowly.  Theaters may not want to invest in indoor playgrounds, but they need to see playgrounds as a rival every bit as real as a multiplex a few miles away.  By understanding the pain points associated with competitive offerings, a business can better invest in emphasizing its distinctive strengths.

3.  What benchmarks exist in the full range of competing offerings and analogies?

Companies should always compare themselves to directly comparable firms, but they should not be seduced by the simplicity of that exercise.  Through examining all that the full set of rivals and analogous offerings can do, they can get excellent ideas for their own business.  For instance, a movie theater could learn from Disney World about how to market merchandise to children and how to entertain people in lines.

4.  What performance criteria do customers use?

Much psychological research has shown that even horribly complicated decisions are often reduced to a small handful of criteria that people can keep in mind at any one time.  What are they for your industry?  What adjectives describe a good solution?  Asking customers these questions can open up surprising routes for improving current solutions or marketing existing offerings more effectively.

5.  What prevents new solutions from being adopted?

Managers are often too enamored of their own ideas.  Unfortunately, even compelling ideas can take a long time to catch on.  Indoor plumbing took 4,500 years from its invention to become widely adopted.  Really, is your idea better than indoor plumbing? Think in a disciplined fashion about all the obstacles hindering adoption of new solutions in your industry.  Talk to customers about how they made a decision to adopt a recent innovation – not innovations in general, as that can average out important details, but rather a specific case study.

6.  What value would success create for customers? 

By understanding the value that lies in resolving a pain point, you can see how many degrees of freedom you have to engineer a new solution.  For instance, if resolving an issue on construction sites could avoid 30 minutes of downtime twice a week, and that time is valued at $600 / hour for the crew, then you get a sense of potential price and cost of a new solution.  Keep in mind that value could be defined by money, time, convenience, peace of mind, and other metrics.

Re-framing a market can be an immensely powerful engine of business growth.  These six steps help to translate Christensen’s theory of jobs-to-be-done – an immensely powerful idea – into specific ideas for action. via forbes.com

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649-4118 or email us for availability.  

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C.K. Prahalad: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

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With the end of the Cold War, the former Soviet Union and its allies, as well as China, India, and Latin America, opened their closed markets to foreign investment in a cascading fashion. Although this significant economic and social transformation has offered vast new growth opportunities for multinational corporations (MNCs), its promise has yet to be realized.

First, the prospect of millions of “middle-class” consumers in developing countries, clamoring for products from MNCs, was wildly oversold. To make matters worse, the Asian and Latin American financial crises have greatly diminished the attractiveness of emerging markets. As a consequence, many MNCs worldwide slowed investments and began to rethink risk–reward structures for these markets. This retreat could become even more pronounced in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the United States last September.

The lackluster nature of most MNCs’ emerging-market strategies over the past decade does not change the magnitude of the opportunity, which is in reality much larger than previously thought. The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers: It is the billions ofaspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.

This is a time for MNCs to look at globalization strategies through a new lens of inclusive capitalism. For companies with the resources and persistence to compete at the bottom of the world economic pyramid, the prospective rewards include growth, profits, and incalculable contributions to humankind. Countries that still don’t have the modern infrastructure or products to meet basic human needs are an ideal testing ground for developing environmentally sustainable technologies and products for the entire world.

Furthermore, MNC investment at “the bottom of the pyramid” means lifting billions of people out of poverty and desperation, averting the social decay, political chaos, terrorism, and environmental meltdown that is certain to continue if the gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen.

Doing business with the world’s 4 billion poorest people — two-thirds of the world’s population — will require radical innovations in technology and business models. It will require MNCs to reevaluate price–performance relationships for products and services. It will demand a new level of capital efficiency and new ways of measuring financial success. Companies will be forced to transform their understanding of scale, from a “bigger is better” ideal to an ideal of highly distributed small-scale operations married to world-scale capabilities.

In short, the poorest populations raise a prodigious new managerial challenge for the world’s wealthiest companies: selling to the poor and helping them improve their lives by producing and distributing products and services in culturally sensitive, environmentally sustainable, and economically profitable ways.

Four Consumer Tiers

At the very top of the world economic pyramid are 75 to 100 million affluent Tier 1 consumers from around the world. (See Exhibit 1.) This is a cosmopolitan group composed of middle- and upper-income people in developed countries and the few rich elites from the developing world. In the middle of the pyramid, in Tiers 2 and 3, are poor customers in developed nations and the rising middle classes in developing countries, the targets of MNCs’ past emerging-market strategies.



Now consider the 4 billion people in Tier 4, at the bottom of the pyramid. Their annual per capita income — based on purchasing power parity in U.S. dollars — is less than $1,500, the minimum considered necessary to sustain a decent life. For well over a billion people — roughly one-sixth of humanity — per capita income is less than $1 per day.

Even more significant, the income gap between rich and poor is growing. According to the United Nations, the richest 20 percent in the world accounted for about 70 percent of total income in 1960. In 2000, that figure reached 85 percent. Over the same period, the fraction of income accruing to the poorest 20 percent in the world fell from 2.3 percent to 1.1 percent.

 This extreme inequity of wealth distribution reinforces the view that the poor cannot participate in the global market economy, even though they constitute the majority of the population. In fact, given its vast size, Tier 4 represents a multitrillion-dollar market. According to World Bank projections, the population at the bottom of the pyramid could swell to more than 6 billion people over the next 40 years, because the bulk of the world’s population growth occurs there.


The perception that the bottom of the pyramid is not a viable market also fails to take into account the growing importance of the informal economy among the poorest of the poor, which by some estimates accounts for 40 to 60 percent of all economic activity in developing countries. Most Tier 4 people live in rural villages, or urban slums and shantytowns, and they usually do not hold legal title or deed to their assets (e.g., dwellings, farms, businesses). They have little or no formal education and are hard to reach via conventional distribution, credit, and communications. The quality and quantity of products and services available in Tier 4 is generally low. Therefore, much like an iceberg with only its tip in plain view, this massive segment of the global population — along with its massive market opportunities — has remained largely invisible to the corporate sector.

Fortunately, the Tier 4 market is wide open for technological innovation. Among the many possibilities for innovation, MNCs can be leaders in leapfrogging to products that don’t repeat the environmental mistakes of developed countries over the last 50 years. Today’s MNCs evolved in an era of abundant natural resources and thus tended to make products and services that were resource-intensive and excessively polluting. The United States’ 270 million people — only about 4 percent of the world’s population — consume more than 25 percent of the planet’s energy resources. To re-create those types of consumption patterns in developing countries would be disastrous.

We have seen how the disenfranchised in Tier 4 can disrupt the way of life and safety of the rich in Tier 1 — poverty breeds discontent and extremism. Although complete income equality is an ideological pipe dream, the use of commercial development to bring people out of poverty and give them the chance for a better life is critical to the stability and health of the global economy and the continued success of Western MNCs.

The Invisible Opportunity


Among the top 200 MNCs in the world, the overwhelming majority are based in developed countries. U.S. corporations dominate, with 82; Japanese firms, with 41, are second, according to a list compiled in December 2000 by the Washington, D.C.–based Institute for Policy Studies. So it is not surprising that MNCs’ views of business are conditioned by their knowledge of and familiarity with Tier 1 consumers. Perception of market opportunity is a function of the way many managers are socialized to think and the analytical tools they use. Most MNCs automatically dismiss the bottom of the pyramid because they judge the market based on income or selections of products and services appropriate for developed countries.
To appreciate the market potential of Tier 4, MNCs must come to terms with a set of core assumptions and practices that influence their view of developing countries.

We have identified the following as widely shared orthodoxies that must be reexamined:

Assumption #1 The poor are not our target consumers because with our current cost structures, we cannot profitably compete for that market.

Assumption #2 The poor cannot afford and have no use for the products and services sold in developed markets.

Assumption #3 Only developed markets appreciate and will pay for new technology. The poor can use the previous generation of technology.

Assumption #4 The bottom of the pyramid is not important to the long-term viability of our business. We can leave Tier 4 to governments and nonprofits.

Assumption #5 Managers are not excited by business challenges that have a humanitarian dimension.

Assumption #6 Intellectual excitement is in developed markets. It is hard to find talented managers who want to work at the bottom of the pyramid. (We suggest reading the full article via strategy-business.com starting with page 3.)

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Business today is a chess match without rules. Requiring nimble competitiveness in which conventional thinking is discarded. InnoThink Group is provocative. Dynamic. Imaginative and committed to helping our clients out compete for top line growth. Hire Jim Woods To Speak to Your Organization.



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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter. 

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How to Be a Truly Global Company : C.K. Prahalad

 During the high-growth years between 1992 and 2007, the globalization of commerce galloped at a faster pace than in any other period in history. Now, amid the chronic unemployment and anti-trade rhetoric of the post-financial-crisis world, some observers wonder whether globalization needs a time-out. However, the experience of multinational companies in the field suggests the opposite. For them, globalization isn’t happening rapidly enough. Whereas GDP growth has stalled in the industrialized world, consumption demand is still expanding in China, India, Russia, Brazil, and other emerging markets. The 1 billion customers of yesterday’s global businesses have been joined by 4 billion more. These customers reside in a much larger geographic area; three-quarters of them are new to the consumer economy, and they need the infrastructure, products, and services that only global companies provide.

The problem is not globalization, but the way our current institutions are set up to respond to this new demand. The prevailing corporate operating model does not work well with the structural changes that have taken place in the global economy.

Most companies are still organized as they were when the market was largely concentrated in the triad of the old industrialized world: the U.S., Europe, and Japan. These structures lead companies to continue building their global strategies around the trade-offs and limits of the past — trade-offs and limits that are no longer accurate or relevant.

One of the most prevalent and pernicious of these perceived trade-offs is the one between centrally driven operating models and local responsiveness. In most companies, an implicit assumption is at play: If you want to gain the full benefits of economies of scale — and to integrate common values, quality standards, and brand identity in your company around the world — then you must centralize your intellectual power and innovation capability at home. You must bring all your products and services into line everywhere, and accept that you can’t fully adapt to the diverse needs and demands of customers in every emerging market.

Alternatively (according to this assumption), if you want locally relevant distribution systems, with rapidly responding supply chains and the lower costs of emerging-market management, then you must decentralize your company and run it as a loose federation. You must move responsibilities for branding and product lineups to the periphery, and accept different trade-offs: more variable cost structures, fewer economies of scale, more diverse and incoherent product lines, and more inconsistent standards of quality.

Some companies try to use strict cost controls to manage these trade-offs. They put in place a decentralized operating model with some central oversight, usually augmented by outsourcing. But this is a tactical move based on expediency, rather than a global strategy. This approach leads to suboptimal results in today’s complex world.

Other false trade-offs are visible in the tension many companies experience between their current business model and the needs of the emerging markets they are entering. They wonder:

Whether to serve existing customers in their home countries or new customers in emerging countries. 

• Whether to meet competitive quality standards demanded by consumers in wealthy countries or offer just the “good enough” features that poorer customers can afford.

• Whether to pursue a strategy of premium or discount pricing.

• How to attract and retain resources and talent, which are perceived as draining away from emerging markets to the industrial world whenever employees are permitted to migrate.

• Whether, in using resources strategically, to follow the typical Western orientation (toward reducing labor and accumulating capital) or the view from emerging markets (where labor is inexpensive, capital is difficult to accumulate, and therefore it is worth investing in building large workforces for growth). via strategy-business.com 

We have a better idea. Hire Jim Woods To Speak to Your Organization.

Business today is a chess match without rules. Requiring nimble competitiveness in which conventional thinking is discarded. InnoThink Group is provocative. Dynamic. Imaginative and committed to helping our clients out compete for top line growth. To see what we can do for you contact us.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter?  

Next Generation Product Development Embracing Hypercompetition, Unpredictability and Uncertainty

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Hypercompetition with scores of more nimble competitors has changed the face if business in all industries and in all parts of the world. Today, no advantage is sustainable. Combining agile up-front processes with a lean approach to the back end can help companies outperform the competition.

At least half of all product launches fail to live up to companies’ expectations. For every four projects that enter development, only one makes it to market, according to a recent study at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Booz & Company found in an earlier study that about 70 percent of the resources spent on new launches are allocated to products that are not successful in the market. Most companies have only themselves to blame. The traditional, gated product design process — what we’ll call the first-generation approach — is rigid and linear, locking in customer preferences, potential risks, and other features at the beginning of the process. Lean product development techniques, a second-generation approach that many companies have adopted in recent years, minimize waste and boost efficiency, but they also lock in product attributes too early and limit innovation.

To get more out of new product design, companies need to adopt a third-generation approach: a more agile product development system capable of addressing frequent iterations of multiple design options early in the process, based on continuous testing and highly sophisticated customer-driven design changes. This method, which both encourages flexibility and recognizes the unpredictability of the early stages of product development, ensures that the latter part of the cycle is much less uncertain, enabling companies to bring more popular products to market at lower cost, and with fewer delays.

Consider, for example, the returns that Apple Inc. has enjoyed from its rapid-fire sequence of products that began with the iPod and its numerous variations, then the iPhone, and finally the iPad — products built using many of the best agile techniques. Apple launched the initial iPod after just six months of development by reusing technology and components that had already been perfected by partners. More recently, Apple was able to significantly upgrade the iPad in only a year, adding a camera, faster processors, and improved battery life, among other features. On a larger industrial scale, there’s Oshkosh Defense, a division of the Oshkosh Corporation. In late 2008, the Pentagon issued a request for proposals for a lightweight off-road vehicle that could protect its crew from improvised explosive devices — and that would be ready for production within seven months. Oshkosh used modular parts from existing equipment; tested the design as it was being produced, generating frequent new iterations; and enforced daily meetings among the core team members across numerous functions, aimed at assessing risk and fine-tuning the development plan. Oshkosh handily overtook its competitors, winning a contract that has generated more than US$2 billion to date.

Of course, Oshkosh’s success illustrates the very aspect of this model that stymies many other organizations: Although more flexible and potentially more profitable, this approach appears to be frighteningly chaotic up front. However, companies that have adopted the approach learn quickly that what they initially give up in orderliness they gain in the ability to create products more effectively, skillfully, and intelligently.

Why New Products Fail

Many companies undertake product development in a way that is simply too regimented. The gated model is a carefully choreographed approach that assumes almost perfect information and analysis at the beginning of the process. All too often, however, by the time the product is introduced, customer needs have evolved (or it becomes clear that they weren’t fully understood in the first place). Further, when design and technology decisions are made early, so much complexity and risk may be introduced that turning back and reworking aspects of development triggers substantial cost overruns and delays in the final stages. We recently examined 50 projects in the automotive, industrial, and aerospace sectors that used the gated model and found that 80 percent of the projects cost 20 percent more person-hours to launch than was initially forecast.

Yet even when it becomes clear that the original plan is not valid, managers frequently decide to march on to product launch because of the huge costs already incurred. They might opt, for example, to exclude features or functionalities that, although high-risk, could offer significant returns. Recall the Apple Newton, an early 1990s tablet device that set out to remake personal computing and the way applications were programmed. Because of numerous design and production stutter steps, the Newton that finally saw the light of day failed once its novelty appeal to early adopters wore off. In the end, it was nothing but an overweight PDA whose handwriting recognition feature, in particular, was an overreach that failed to meet customer needs.

Orderly but frequently ineffective, the gated approach has lost some of its luster in recent years. Many companies have replaced it with lean product development, which focuses on eliminating waste and improving speed-to-market. Lean product development has improved project execution efficiency, allowing the best lean-focused companies — for example, United Technologies, General Electric, and Toyota — to launch more projects and products within their budgetary limits. Companies applying lean techniques add continuous touch points with customers so they can test product concepts, prototypes, and features along the development and launch cycle. In so doing, they have reduced cycle time by as much as 30 percent compared to the gated approach, as well as lowered development costs by as much as 40 percent and achieved dramatic gains in first-time quality.

But lean techniques fall short at the front end of the process. The enhanced efficiency of lean product development is (like the gated model) still highly dependent on early stabilization of requirements, rather than iterating, optimizing, and trading off requirements to get to the winning product design. As a result, whatever innovation there is in this approach tends to be based on safeguarding the status quo rather than being creative — leaving companies exposed to disruptive changes in the market later on.

Agile and Lean

Given these shortcomings, we believe that a new, third-generation process is critical for success: one that applies agile product development techniques at the front end and lean approaches at the back end. Software companies have been the earliest adopters of this process, because they must routinely iterate numerous versions of their programs, and must assess them against customer needs and preferences well before the software is ready for mass release. Without customer codevelopment, a deep knowledge of product integration risks, and extensive testing to eliminate bugs at the beginning of the development cycle, software companies would essentially be operating blind, uncertain of the stability of their products or how they will be received.

The goal of agile product development is to achieve rapid and frequent iterations with multiple design options up front — driven by continuous testing and granular customer analyses — in order to optimize, balance, and prioritize requirements and identify risks earlier. This early stage of the process has four primary characteristics.

1. Rapid, iterative development model. Companies generate multiple concepts, and in a period of weeks, rather than months, test product prototypes with customers. As the results come in, cross-functional product development teams — design, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, and sales and marketing, among others — work together in problem-solving sessions to produce a blueprint based on customer responses and the new ideas that these responses generate. Frequently, these sessions are held in rooms with paper placed on the walls and scribbled on as new concepts gestate, rather than in more traditional and formal meetings. Toyota calls this approach oobeya, or “big room.” An effective approach for implementing this step is to pick an upcoming market opportunity and conduct a front-end pilot, applying rapid iterations to generate and test multiple product options.

2. Modular architecture. By breaking a product concept into modules, companies can give sub-teams the responsibility to work out the best set of solutions for the final design and manufacturing of their part of the project, including interfaces, materials, or potential trouble spots. Armed with this input, design teams reunite the modules to set the plans for the next iteration of the product. It is critical to designate a creative manager to orchestrate this part of the process, and ensure that all contingencies are being discussed and that the activity doesn’t devolve into a wasteful and inefficient exercise. The most innovative companies, such as Apple and Google, assign this role to their most talented product managers and systems experts. The auto industry has made good use of modular architecture, allowing carmakers to refresh model lines and introduce new versions of their vehicles while reusing multiple parts, designs, and components from prior iterations. Conducting an “architecture” session to evaluate the modularity shortcomings of current product offerings and generate ways to improve product modularity and flexibility is a must.

3. Early risk identification. As cross-functional teams rapidly iterate and synthesize product ideas and concepts, more often than not the deep dive into the design process reveals potential development risks. With this knowledge, teams can prioritize potential risks and incorporate risk reduction plans — such as focused lead-customer research and early engineering assessments — into the development slate, while scheduling routine test events to verify that risks have been addressed. A major medical device company handled this approach particularly well recently by mandating that all development plans and contingency tests include rigorous risk management controls, rather than placing risk management activities on a schedule separate from product development. Using this program, the company reduced problems in post-launch product quality and performance by more than 80 percent.

4. Intensive stakeholder and supplier involvement. Traditionally, companies hold suppliers and the manufacturing function at arm’s length until product requirements and concepts have matured. By contrast, the agile front-end approach seeks to gain the input of all stakeholders — customers, partners, suppliers, and sales and manufacturing teams — to critique designs, offer insights, and broadly minimize risk and maximize efficiency up front so that fewer changes need to be made during production or product launch. The best way to do this is to appoint someone on each project team to be a supplier integrator. This person brings suppliers into the development process at critical points while working to understand supplier perspectives and capabilities, thereby enhancing the likelihood that suppliers will meet cost, quality, and scheduling expectations.

Because mature product definition and risk management take place early in the process, the application of lean techniques to the back end minimizes the wasted effort and resources typically expended on product launches. This later stage also has four key characteristics.

1. Reusable platforms and modules. Using the lean approach gives teams the luxury of setting up a development plan that mitigates the need to redesign large parts of the product from scratch in every cycle and iteration. Some product features are designated as necessary but not highly valued by customers; these are then treated as common modules that can be reused over multiple product generations. This approach gives agile development teams the chance to apply most of their resources toward “intelligent customization” of product iterations, adding only those new features and capabilities that customers value most. This not only saves development effort and time, but also increases speed-to-market. Many leading companies maximize reuse by developing common features, parts, and specifications libraries that are centerpieces of new developer training. In some cases, the libraries are automated and fully integrated into product management systems and IT tools.

2. Just-in-time information and resources. These are bedrocks of traditional lean systems. In product development projects, just-in-time elements take a slightly different cast but ultimately achieve the same ends as they do in manufacturing. For example, several aerospace and industrial companies have begun to form “expert cells” of engineers who can do specialized design and development analytic work on an on-demand or just-in-time basis. Demand/pull lean planning techniques are used to ensure that work packages for development teams from these cells are accomplished on schedule, in turn allowing the core project teams to focus on risk mitigation and customer preferences. Implementation requires development of simple workload forecasts and demand-planning tools that match project demand with available functional skills. This helps companies avoid starving critical projects of necessary resources and unnecessarily deploying resources on less critical tasks.

3. Lean supplier integration. Just as suppliers are intimately involved in the early stages, these partners also collaborate in the detailed development and prelaunch phases. The goal is to identify the most critical product and process features, as well as risk mitigation parameters, while ensuring that supplier partners can meet these benchmarks at a high level of quality. If these so-called critical-to-quality parameters are identified early enough in the process — in the agile stage, for example — they can be moved down the supply chain to avoid costly quality problems and delays in the lean phases. Creating critical-to-quality task teams made up of core development groups and leading suppliers that apply state-of-the-art Six Sigma tools is one way to start developing this capability.

4. Responsive change-control system. Applying the third-generation approach not only dramatically reduces the number of changes that occur during the development life cycle, but also ensures that product alterations do not greatly slow down the overall process. This is accomplished by having a highly responsive change-control approach in place, backed by the appropriate internal systems and technology. That’s a far cry from the norm in many companies, in which change management depends on outdated processes and systems and features ineffective queues for sign-off and approval — a flurry of red tape that erodes speed-to-market. By applying lean analysis and principles, some industrial companies have seen dramatic results: reductions of as much as 75 percent in the time they take to process and approve changes. Change management bottlenecks are eliminated, and time-to-launch targets are maintained. Companies can start by determining how much time elapses between change initiation and change implementation; if it’s a month or more, they have an opportunity to cut it down.

Order Out of Chaos

Companies that implement the next-generation product development model enjoy significant returns, well beyond what they could expect with either the gated or the lean approach. However, it’s not an easy process. It requires significant behavioral change for most companies, which alone makes rapid transformation unlikely. Success with the agile front-end approach is dependent on a highly collaborative organizational culture, reflecting the idea that most disruptive innovations come from outside the organization. To embed this culture and outpace competitors, companies must continuously scout, filter, and channel global sources of technology, capabilities, and solutions as well as recommendations from suppliers. Perhaps most important, companies need to understand that delivery of differentiated products requires a deep well of sophisticated customer knowledge. Product teams must spend substantial time in the field, observing customers using their products in real-life situations.

Many companies lack the skills, structures, metrics, and incentives to isolate market opportunities before they become obvious or to incubate and validate them before turning those opportunities over to a product development organization that can bring them to market effectively. To overcome these organizational weaknesses, executives must address decision rights and information flows with the goal of developing faster decision-making capabilities and mobilizing quickly to take advantage of new first-to-market opportunities. High-level metrics — for example, return on innovation investment, which measures the overall health of the product portfolio and pipeline — as well as project-level yardsticks that assess yield, value, and speed across the development life cycle should be adopted. Such carefully chosen metrics can improve transparency and accountability, enabling more educated decision making and trade-offs in the up-front agile iteration cycles.

Globalization has created scores of nimble competitors in every industry; as a result, the product development environment is too volatile for linear, standardized processes. In such a landscape, an approach that embraces the value of flexibility and unpredictability is needed to generate more stable and successful outcomes. Paradoxically, although gated processes are focused on linearity and order, they often result in chaos. In contrast, the agile model, driven by chaos and uncertainty at the front end, yields greater order at the latter stages of product development. It is the surest way to permanently increase product success rates and develop a much stronger, more sustainable position in the marketplace. via S&B; by Barry Jaruzelski, Richard Holman, and Omar Daud

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. 

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Self-charging power-stroller folds & unfolds automatically

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Billed as “the world’s first power-folding stroller,” Origami demands nothing more from the user than the simple touch of a button to collapse or unfold it.

Folding or unfolding a traditional baby stroller is often a cumbersome task, but a new innovation debuted at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this year is now looking to change that. Billed as “the world’s first power-folding stroller,” Origami demands nothing more from the user than the simple touch of a button to collapse or unfold it.

The creation of Pittsburgh-based 4moms, the new Origami stroller’s main selling point is its ability to fold and unfold automatically, but it boasts a wealth of other features as well. The device houses a built-in generator in its rear wheels that charges the stroller as it’s pushed, as well as enabling parents to charge their cell phones. Daytime running lights and pathway lights are on board for safety, as are four-wheel suspension and child safety sensors in the seat, which ensure the stroller won’t fold by accident. An LCD in the handle bar, meanwhile, displays a thermometer, speedometer, and odometer. The video below offers a quick demo of the device in action:

Priced at USD 850, the Origami stroller is available online and at select stores. Retailers around the globe: one to add to your own high-end line of kid-focused offerings? via springwise

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter. 

Subscription service offers organic baby food direct from local farms

Farm to Baby NYC is targeting parents with a subscription-based service offering organic baby food.

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Subscription service offers organic baby food direct from local farms

There’s no shortage of efforts bringing more sustainable and transparent food alternatives to consumers. Now, New York-based Farm to Baby NYC is specifically targeting parents with a subscription-based service offering organic baby food.

To begin using the service, parents based in New York can log onto the Farm to Baby NYC website and order a range of seasonal produce – from hubbard squash to parsnips and spinach – sourced from farms in the local area. Customers can sign up for either Half Membership, which offers four 10-ounce pots per week for USD 55, or Full Membership, which includes eight 10-ounce pots per week for USD 99. The glass pots are collected by Farm to Baby NYC for re-use. The service currently uses Gorzynski Ornery Farm and W. Rogowski Farm in New York and Phillips Farms in New Jersey, ensuring a low carbon footprint and supporting these local businesses.

An idea ripe for exporting to other parts of the world? via springwise

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.

Fashion brand offers discounts based on a shopper’s social influence

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Volga Verdi is a California-based fashion brand that offers its customers discounts depending on the number of friends, followers or fans they have on popular social networks.

Marketers have long known that consumers vary widely in terms of their influence over others, but today’s social networks are making those differences plain for all to see. Aiming to zero in on the shoppers with the widest social clout, Volga Verdi is a California-based fashion brand that offers its customers discounts depending on the number of friends, followers or fans they have on popular social networks.

To participate in Volga Verdi’s Exchange program, shoppers begin by referring to a chart on the site listing the size of the discount it offers for the number of friends or followers they have on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, tumblr, Kohtakte or Lookbook.nu. Twitter users, for example, get a discount of USD 7 if they have between 20 and 200 followers, or USD 15 if they have more. To get the discount, they must follow Volga Verdi on Twitter, tweet a prespecified message about the brand, and then email Volga Verdi to confirm they have taken part. Those on other social networks would need to perform similar actions tailored to the social network they are using. Volga Verdi then proceeds to issue a unique voucher code for the corresponding discount.

We’ve already seen sites that “sell” online content for just a tweet or a Facebook mention — namely, Pay with a Tweet and Social Whispers — but offering discounts based on the shopper’s social clout takes such efforts onto new ground. Other retailers around the globe: how about you? via springwise.com 

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.

Be a Innovation Tactician Not a Strategist.

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“Innovation” is a word CEOs hear all the time. Your company must be innovative. In order to stand out in a tough economy you need to innovate. It’s a buzzword that you can’t escape, but what exactly does it mean? How exactly can create an innovative environment? Fast Company’s editor-in-chief Robert Safian thinks he knows the answer.

Here are Safian’s 8 principles of innovation:  

1. Growth should be a tactic, not a strategy: quality over quantity is a principle Starbucks has used to revitalize its brand
2. Big companies need to be as nimble as startups: agility is key if you want to keep up with new technologies and a constantly changing marketplace
3. Tech is disruptive in unexpected places: technology affects all industries, Safian gives the examples of LegalZoom (legal documents), KivaSystems (robots in warehousing) and Polyvore (fashion)
4. Design is a competitive advantage: don’t ignore the user experience
5. Social media makes products and services better: all organizations can benefit from social media, just look at the National Marrow Donation Program as an example
6. Data is power: compiling and storing data makes (and keeps) you highly relevant
7. Money is flowing: banks aren’t the only place to find funding anymore, just look at Kickstarter and Y Combinator
8. Copycats are history: you need to be original across all markets, new ideas are coming out of BRIC countries too. chief executive

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a global innovation, growth and hypercompetition consultancy. He is an author and speaker on strategic innovation, education and competitive advantage. To hire Jim to speak to your organization - Call 719- 649- 4118 or email us for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.