Enact Strategy
When it comes to enacting a growth strategy, most companies will choose to modify products already in the pipeline or create a new product. The licensing of intellectual property and M&A activities, although viable, are often costly or difficult to execute. Whichever path a company chooses, however, the ODI process is helpful in ensuring a successful result.
When the ODI toolset is used for generating new product concepts or improving products in the pipeline, companies are certain to devise concepts that satisfy numerous unmet needs, making them potential breakthrough products. The ODI approach to idea generation works because the customer needs are already identified and prioritized and the growth paths are already chosen, enabling the creative efforts of employees to be much more focused. We have learned that companies rarely lack ideas – but they often lack focus. Knowing where to focus creativity changes the dynamics of idea generation. (The article “Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box,” Harvard Business Review, December 2007 offers more insight into the concept of focused brainstorming.)
The ODI toolset also contains valuable tools for concept validation. When using traditional concept evaluation methods, companies usually place a solution in front of a customer for evaluation. They expect the customer to make the connection between the product and its features and their own unmet needs. And yet those needs are never explicitly articulated. In this situation, customers often give conflicting evaluations, and those evaluations do not accurately reflect how customers will behave toward the product in the marketplace.
We have discovered that concept evaluation can be made much more accurate by asking customers to evaluate a new concept for its ability to satisfy a comprehensive set of customer needs. By presenting a feature to a customer and asking the degree to which that feature will satisfy a specific need, a complete and accurate evaluation can be made. Using this approach, companies can quantify potential improvements in customer satisfaction, make informed pricing decisions, and invest in new product and service concepts with confidence. This same methodology can be used to effectively evaluate intellectual property or to evaluate an M&A opportunity.
