Your Customers Don't Care About Innovation
What customers do care about is whether your business meets their needs, and more specifically their individual needs. Don't get me wrong, innovation is essential to the process of figuring out what your customer wants, and then delivering valuable solutions accordingly. But innovation should not be purely for innovation's sake; it is best driven by a well-defined purpose that considers your customers' needs and aligns with your business strategy.
Assuming that you've been through the process of defining your business strategy, and have a clear vision for the future, you may be encountering some challenges around realising some of your strategic objectives. For instance, you may have identified an objective such as the achievement of competitive advantage through a differentiated customer experience. The enabler for this objective would be a requirement for in-depth customer data and analytics to better define and understand your customer.
This type of an initiative would probably require an overhaul of your customer touch points and a cultural shift within your business. It might not be clear how you should go about achieving this overhaul, and spending time, money and the valuable skills of your team on half-baked solutions makes no sense. It might be time to get creative and seek innovative solutions that can be prototyped and tested.
Let's take a step back and consider what innovation is and what it means for your business.
What is innovation?
Innovation means many things to many people, depending on their perspectives, needs and requirements; for instance, innovation author, Nick Silicorn, defines innovation as:
"Turning an idea into a solution that adds value from a customer's perspective." - Nick Silicorn
Barack Obama is quoted as saying:
"Innovation is the creation of something that improves the way we live our lives." - Barack Obama
Another innovation author, Scott Berkun, uses the following definition:
"Innovation is significant, positive change." - Scott Berkun
All great perspectives, and yet they don't share a common meaning. In fact, the word innovation is often used as a 'catch all' phrase in boardrooms around the world because there is no clear or consensual definition for it. Scott Berkun actually advises people against using the word innovation at all.
Agreeing on a definition is a debate for another time. But what's clear from the three definitions above is that innovation is important.
A February 2016 white paper from Vodafone (based on a survey of over 200 decision-makers for UK corporate strategy) sees innovation as vital to big business success.
"According to the strategy leaders we surveyed, innovation is very important for enabling continued success and a lot sooner than you may think. Half of big business leaders believe it's very important to innovate in order to be successful for just the next two years, with the figure rising to over 70% when you look ahead to the next five years."
Introducing a culture of innovation into your business may not be easy to do, and likely brings a level of risk, but could help you to realise the following benefits:
- An increase in productivity
- An increase in turnover and profitability
- A reduction of costs
- An increase in the value of your brand
- The establishment of new relationships or partnerships
- A competitive edge
Now, let's talk about the underlying principle behind innovation: great ideas transformed into actionable solutions.
I know what you're thinking: "'Great ideas', you say? Doesn't that mean I need a bunch of crazy creatives with odd titles like 'chief creative officer'?" No, it means that you need to unlock and harness the creative potential of your current team in constructive ways to solve your current challenges via actionable ideas.
Here's how you might approach an undertaking like this…
Understand Your Customer
1. Whether your customers consciously know it or not, they have certain needs they want you to meet. Your job is to define those needs through a process of observation, data gathering and understanding – you may even need some empathy while you're at it. The corporate world doesn't like that 'empathy' word much. It's generally perceived as having little value in the workplace. But don't underestimate its power and usefulness in helping you better understand and connect with your customer, and people in general.
2. Your next step is to define the nature of your challenge by ensuring that you arrive at a clearly defined problem statement that includes the needs of your customer.
If we go back to the earlier example of 'overhauling your customer touch points', and let's say the business sells healthy ready-to-eat meals. In this scenario, you might define your problem statement as something like:
Our health-conscious, higher-income, online consumers need our online ordering system to be reliable, fast, intuitive and convenient to use because they are time sensitive but still want to eat healthy meals on the go.
3. This problem statement then becomes the focus of your internal ideation sessions, and the outcomes from those sessions would be many ideas to optimise your site interface, backend systems and real-time customer communications.
4. Innovation does not stop at the ideation stage, and really comes into being when you take your great ideas, prototype them and conduct market testing.
Innovation and Digital Transformation
Innovative thinking within your business should not stop after you've solved one challenge or achieved a strategic goal. Customer-focussed problem solving, coupled with a fail-fast, learn-much attitude, should be the basis on which you go forward with any venture.
There is a bigger picture though, and innovation is one of many consideration factors. In the digital transformation space, the Digital Advisory team that I work with considers your digital maturity within the context of the following six pillars:
- Customer
- Data and Analytics
- Innovation
- Organisational Design
- Business-Process Optimisation
- Technology
Depending on your business priorities and/or strategy, you may find that focussing on your maturity in the innovation pillar is secondary to focussing on your data and analytics maturity. However, solving your data and analytics challenges might require some creative thinking, prototyping and testing – in other words, innovative thinking.
Either way, cultivating innovation within your business is essential – no matter your focus or level of maturity. According to the findings from the 2016 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project:
"Digitally maturing companies surveyed place a strong emphasis on innovation and are over twice as likely to be investing in innovation than are early-stage entities — 87% versus 38%"
Once again, customers don't care about innovation. But you should, especially when considering your customer's needs.
Enviado desde mi iPhone
Comentarios