What is Outcome-Driven Innovation?
Tony Ulwick
Jan 1, 2011
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
Over the past 20 years, innovation experts have led companies to believe that it is impossible to know all their customers’ needs. They contend that customers can’t articulate their needs, and that customers have latent needs — or needs they don’t know they have.
Consequently, companies think they have no choice – and that it is acceptable and even advantageous – to conceive and develop products and services based upon an understanding of customer needs that is strongly influenced by intuition and gut feel. Although this approach may have personal and emotional appeal, it is the reason why products and services fail nearly 80 percent of the time.
So let’s challenge this long-held belief. What if it turns out that the “experts” are wrong? What if customers do know all their needs? What if it is possible to capture these needs up front in the innovation process - before solutions are created to address those needs and before a product or service is ever introduced into the pipeline?
Here is the answer: instead of failing 80 percent of the time, companies will succeed in their innovation efforts 86 percent of the time.
How do we know this? Because over the past 20 years we have created and refined an innovation process called Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) that invalidates this old thinking. In addition, a ten-year track record study reveals that when the world’ most respected companies use this innovation process to create new products and services, they experience an 86 percent success rate. This is a complete turn-around in the innovation industry.
The ability to know all customer needs up front improves nearly every aspect of the strategy and innovation process – from deciding what markets to pursue, to deciding what opportunities to target and with what solutions, to deciding how to position and sell those products in the marketplace. And there are other benefits. From a financial perspective, achieving an 86 percent success rate reduces product development investments by 75 percent and focuses resources on the right products so they get to market faster.
You can learn more about Outcome-Driven Innovation® and how it can benefit you by downloading this white paper. For those interested in understanding the future of innovation, this paper is a must read.
