Innovation jobs-to-be-done - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

Innovation, ecosystems, platforms and the promise of more to come

@paul4innovating — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 16:36:02 +0000

Jeffrey Phillips and I are launching our fourth collaboration together, this time we are exploring innovation ecosystems and the growing impact they are having in the business world through their ‘conecting and collaborating difference’ that can lead to vastly different final customer experiences.

I just want to reaffirm what he has written on this, originally over on his site.

This is what he wrote:

Innovation, ecosystems, platforms and more

“I’m pleased to announce that Paul Hobcraft and I will be working together on a number of posts that relate to some discussions we’ve had about innovation, more specifically how innovation must evolve from creating interesting but incomplete solutions to understanding how customers want to have interesting, seamless experiences. Over the next few weeks we’ll be writing posts on a new shared website that examine the state of innovation, and provide a reason we think so many innovation outcomes fail to achieve their goals.

From that assessment we’ll look at what customers really want: solutions and experiences, not discrete products. People are too busy, too harried, have too little patience and cannot keep up with technology advances. They don’t want to be forced to “stitch” disparate solutions together, and expect products, services, business models, channels and experiences to work together to provide a complete solution.

In the course of several interrelated blog posts Paul and I will be talking about innovation, the necessary “ecosystem” for success, why good innovators won’t think about products, services and business models in isolation, and how platforms contribute to greater innovation success. If you are interested in:

Disruptive innovation
Ecosystems
Platforms
Seamless experiences
Open Innovation
The “whole experience”

This new site and our subsequent posts on the site will be on point. What’s more, we hope you’ll contribute your ideas, feedback and suggestions on what we are talking about, what we get right and where you think we’ve missed a concept or an idea.

In the longer term I hope we’ll convince you that interesting innovation relies on ecosystems and platforms, and disruptive innovation creates new ecosystems. In fact we believe that along with a product manager, a new role or position will emerge that is equally important: the ecosystem manager.

But, one step at a time. I hope you’ll join us on our shared WordPress site: Ecosystems 4 Innovators, where we’ll be publishing our thinking on these and other topics. Paul has done a great job of pulling together some of our other joint material, which I hope you’ll take the time to review.”

My additional notes:

*The joint material referred to is on this link into the insights & thinking page. It has some good material to relate too if you are thinking through many aspects of innovation that need this

* The first “kick-off” post is up and can be viewed here

* Also, the journey Jeffrey and I have had, over four ‘decent’ collaborations, started back in 2010 (I think), and please do read the collaborative story outlined under “Authors Purpose“

* Please join us over on this dedicated site of ecosystems4innovating as we regularly update our thinking under the “Two Authors- Diverse Opinion” principle in the weeks and months ahead.

Save

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Tackling the internal Jobs-to-be-done for improving Innovation

@paul4innovating — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 08:24:57 +0000

We are constantly nudged toward understanding the needs of customers through the jobs to be done approach to shaping our innovative solutions. So why do we still seem to not achieve this ‘higher purpose’ of providing solutions to customers’ needs?

Predictable growth has run its course as we live in unpredictable times; we need a better way to identify ALL those unmet needs that our customers have.

That need comes from knowing the “job which needs to be done”. We need to sharp shoot to hit clear targets, we need to become a lot more explicit in our knowledge of a customer’s unmet needs, and they need to make the connection of that need with our product (or service).

Mapping the hierarchy of customer needs

We need to map the jobs and generate desired outcome statements that are specific and of real interest to the customer, not our list of multiple ideas generated based on where we are or what we think we know. We need to build a hierarchy of customer needs.

By even attempting to follow a ‘needs first’ approach we are often left to figure out the unmet needs. The flaw lies in not having these fully understood. All needs can be captured but this requires combining a more rigorous, controlled approach, coupled with astute observations.

The key still requires us to accurately quantify the degree to which a proposed solution will increase customer satisfaction – and that means knowing the jobs they want to complete.

We need to segment by jobs and to do this we need to capture this in clear, precise job outcome given statements. We need to become clearer on the product, service or business model ‘job’ it is intended to perform, measured by a customer’s desired outcome.

I really believe our internal processes are letting us down.

There is real scope to do a jobs-to-be-done (JtbD) evaluation internally, let me explain. We can become so intent on finding out the customer JtbD that we might be forgetting the internal ones that need addressing as well, they get ignored and continue to ‘undo’ all the hard work of customer need discovery.

We need to fix the internal need for innovation first, the job we are trying to achieve. We are failing on this considerably.

So what is the internal job to be done?

Is it to keep everyone employed in developing and launching new products, to keep our innovation structures humming along or just because it is expected from us?

Surely the job to be done might be “to reduce the product failure rate” – the end need is to get into the innovation pipeline only high-value products that are sustainable, offer clear market differentiation and have a distinct demand. Often we allow products into the development pipeline that are less than stellar.

Actually, we have a wide range of reasons for ensuring failure before the product even gets launched. These are the jobs to be UNDONE that need to be eliminated.

Can you spot these happening within your organization? Do you sense you have seen or been part of this set of actions that had the triggering effect of altering the product from its original discovery point?

Failure Points	Activity outcome and its potential impact on failure
Inattention	Someone decides to deviate from the original detailed specifications and this impacts significantly on the JtbD originally identified but accepted internally as ‘an acceptable’ risk, without any tracking back and validating this ‘internal’ change and how it compromises the original need.
Lack of Ability	The skills, conditions or training to execute the JtbD that has been identified, so as to successfully translate this back into a product that delivers on this need are not available within the organization. They are not brought in to offset this lack of internal ability, it becomes ‘let’s reinvent here’ failing to understand critical experience points.
Deviance	The internal process suddenly gets short-circuited to speed up the process, the missing ingredient of understanding gets overridden by this need for speed or someone up top overrides the process and the deviance has a knock-on effect that (radically) alters the final product intent.
Process Inadequacy	The discovery and development process is faulty, they miss critical signs or ignore them and keep pushing on to keep to the prescribed project timeline for fear of being singled out. To call stop is bad and indicates weakness, not strength, so the process continues regardless
Uncertainty	The initial idea lacks the type of real clarity researchers require, gaps begin to be filled in by one person’s assumption, which was ‘best’ judgement and ‘reasonable’ but produces undesired results that are difficult to call a stop to. Actions adjust going forward with future consequences
Task Challenge	The task becomes far too difficult to execute reliably every time and the eventual production quality becomes variable and compromised and the products lack consistency on that final finish and fail to meet the expectancies of the customer
Process Complexity	Those well laid out plans, built on a complex final production layout suddenly encounter constant and sometimes novel interactions unexpected and cost overruns, delays, and final product rejections all suddenly rise with variable final product results that should have been unacceptable but forced to be acceptable, but on to the consumer.
Hypothesis Testing	The hypothesis sounded great, it was heavily backed as a winner but suddenly fails, sometimes when capital commitments have been made. Instead of simply ‘pulling the plug’ it begins to have a momentum of its own, heads go down to prove the hypothesis irrespective.
Exploratory Testing	Some adjustments or experimentation made it into the final product, it was meant to be a clever addition to expand knowledge and cater to the JtbD need but has undesired results unforeseen or not thought through.

Tackling the internal JtbD is not easy. While we deviate, while we let internal interpretations into our new product development process we are building in the chance of product failure.

Managing the internal JtbD really does need thinking about.

Knowing the need of our customers and markets is the place that will get us towards growing our business. Yet we do need to focus more often on the failures we have in the internal Job to be Done to actually improve our product success rate. Internal ego and the innate wish to constantly meddle along the innovation development process seem to have many jobs that need to be undone.

We need as much internal discipline to stay focused and true to a discovered customer need within our internal processes and pipeline.

How often does a product in its development get altered to accommodate internal wishes? This internally driven perspective, intent on ‘just’ getting the product out of the door, because keeping it in its original state seems simply too hard for all sorts of reasons.

The emotional factors kick in and you hear “compromise and cannibalise” and a host of other fear factors to protect existing products, systems or structures that are ‘turf’ driven.

Internally we have this need to identify the true internal jobs-to-be-done and that often centres around deviations from the “customer need discovery point” and it is these which might be causing more failure than you realized, well before any product gets launched. These internal failures need to be undone.

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Publishing note: This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

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Building upon four key wealth creating pillars

@paul4innovating — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 10:54:14 +0000

Most rooms we enter have four sides and are traditionally built on a standard four-pillar design; they provide the structure to build upon.

Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited in our wealth-creating possibilities.

Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak, not strong.

We are certainly relying far too much on ‘selected’ pockets of economic activity to keep us going. Technology is clearly one of these.

Yet our longer-term forces for sustaining growth remain ‘fragile’, our structures remain wickedly out of kilter and we need to find stronger connecting frameworks that reinforce each other, so we can build further upon these to manage our business activities in new ways.

In most of our economic activities technology is playing a significant part in altering our habits, routines and thinking but it alone is not enough.

For technology to really give benefit it needs to be driven by our ability to generate wealth-creating activity and that comes from integrating knowledge, gaining experience and being able to articulate this in better ways.

To achieve this, the business structures that we have in the past relied upon are in need of changing. They need different pillars to build upon.

Welcome to my four pillar room……..with a view

One such room I see has four pillars; firstly a value creation one, then one that prompts a change in our thinking around the value and creation of constantly evolving business models, a third one based on understanding our intellectual capital base, where our knowledge resides and can be harnessed, and then the final pillar of the innovation capital that can be generated from this to create wealth-generating opportunities.

Why are these four pillars important as our structure within our ‘wealth-creating’ room?

Pillar one – For me we lack the ability to articulate the value creation narrative.

We need always the wealth-generating perspective to get behind. We want to feel this is ‘dynamic’ and can offer all those involved that feeling of identification, so we can find individual ways to apply them, where there are the combining and transforming possibilities for us to, investigate, explore and exploit. We are searching to manifest fresh, new outcomes to create new wealth-creating potential.

To have the ability to articulate the value, what potentials can make up the possibilities to develop and deliver the future promise? Developing a good value creation narrative is essential, it requires critical components and for us all to identify through a common language.

Value creation and its potential can be created through the Business Model. It is identifying the inputs from the different capitals and the ways we can transform these through business activities and interactions. Our ability to articulate where the value creation potential lies requires our ‘narrative’ to be broken down, often called the value proposition.

Pillar two – The Business model is becoming even more critical today

The whole movement towards creating the business model through a canvas approach allows us to articulate our ‘potential’ value generating story. As we learn to work with all the components that make up a business model we are responding, capturing, creating and delivering a constant flow of new value generating opportunities.

The more we can express ourselves through narratives and the emerging business model canvas we are offering disclosures, we are setting in train discussions so others can contribute and add to these emerging business model concepts.

To sketch out our business model canvas, we do need to constantly work the BM canvas for the integrated design. What we must try to develop within our narrative and canvas is the underlying dynamics that capture the process of change and why this combination provides the value creation.

Underlying any Business Model is knowledge, experiences and insight. These come from combing all our capitals and the ones often described under our ‘intellectual capital assets’ become essential.

Pillar three – Re-framing the debate around our intellectual capital assets
It seems today our business environment is highly diverse, far more dynamic and subject to rapid change. We need to constantly survey the landscape to adapt and adjust, acquiring what is needed. The increasing value is to know all the potentials within the ‘interactions’ of the parts and how to renew and recombine them on a constant basis.

Often intellectual capital is grouped into three or sometimes more categories. The capitals commonly used to describe ICA are human, structural and relationship capitals. In summary:

a) human capital have at its core the competences we build, our intellectual agility and attitudes to form potential synergies for new value creation. Our outcomes are governed by our motivations to want to produce fresh knowledge creation or simply absorb what is ‘out’ there.

b) The structural capital provides ‘the skeleton and glue’ of the organization in its philosophies, processes, routines, infrastructures, culture etc., for permitting and building knowledge. It builds the mechanisms and architecture.

c) Our relationship capital, is our third ICA, which represents our abilities to make connections, to network so as to absorb, exploit and explore new knowledge, it is this new understanding that feeds and influences organizations life, to renew, to rejuvenate, and to offer longevity.

We need to move beyond often just that academic debate around intellectual capital and their asset value, moving well beyond simply infer the value of our intellectual capital, we need to really understand its make-up.

It is the interactions of these intellectual capitals that is becoming essential to understand, they make up our innovation capital. Knowledge alone has limited value, it is the knowing how to apply it through innovation that will offer us the potential for wealth generation.

Pillar four – Innovation capital is the essential strategic asset to strive for.

Innovation is made up of a collection of ‘stock’ and our abilities to allow this stock to ‘flow’. We mostly acknowledge and recognize innovation is essential for business growth and our future wealth generation potential.

Innovation is for me a real wealth generating capital, it is future orientated; it needs consistent learning, experimentation, exploration and reconfiguring. The innovation capital is the ‘core sum’ of the abilities we can combine from our intellectual capitals.

I believe we need a new innovation capital valuation model. It needs to capture the dynamic interactions of our capitals contributing and ‘render’ these into different productive outcomes. This model needs to find and then separate the ‘dynamic’ from the ‘static’ innovation capabilities, the ones that offer new potential not ones simply repeating the process.

To achieve this we need to unbundle resources, assets, renewables, competencies and capabilities and describe these outcomes in , in my view, a fitness landscape that provides a visual of what you have, what you might need and highlight where the critical gaps lie.

We are needing to understand how our organizations can integrate, reconfigure, renew and recreate its resources and capabilities to build different value creation propositions and business models.

Recognizing the combining effect of the four pillars

For me, it is recognizing the ‘combining effects’ of these four pillars; of value creation (vc), business models (bm), intellectual capital assets (ica) and innovation capital (ic). It is the dynamics within the multiple combinations that will generate the future wealth creation we need.

We are in need of having a better understanding of the integrated value focal points of these four pillars combining, they need connecting so we can build the supporting structures and place the roof of need, our wealth creating one, to give us a new potential of harnessing our innate abilities to be creative.

These four pillars offer perhaps a new core, a new transforming power, they make our activities connected and dynamic.

Unlocking all our potential is the job needing to be delivered upon

Our job today is to unlock the potentials from knowledge, harnessing our capitals to focus more on releasing our resources to work on their dynamic capabilities that combine vc + bm + ica + ic to make this a ‘room’ that gives us the potential to reside and generate new wealth potential.

A transforming one, where the make-up of value creation, articulated through business model designs by knowing the capitals that ‘feed into’ and build our stocks and flows for new innovation that does have the greater potential for wealth creation to occur.

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Innovation jobs-to-be-done

@paul4innovating — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:23:10 +0000

I tend to not like offering up checklists as blog posts, you know those one hundred and one ideas for this or that, although I have to admit I like collecting them as a kick-starting resource. Today I decided to change my mind, Why?

Well, I think those of us involved in innovation need to keep reminding ourselves to not just work on the day’s problem that is in front of us but to ‘move along all the others, so this is my innovation jobs-to-be-done list that clients and consultants need to work upon.

Also, these do build towards a possible Chief Innovation Officer’s agenda and content.

A reminder of what we need to keep tackling and consciously working on.

What do you think?

Building innovation capabilities: evaluating and accessing the company’s innovation capabilities, working through the culture, climate and environment that is needed for innovation, and removing the barriers to innovation to increase the potential available.
Developing the competencies and capacities to innovate: making innovation everybody’s everyday job; to grow the understanding and organization for innovation and often for the renewal that is needed.
Creating breakthrough strategies: insights and fresh thinking, tools & techniques that enable the creation of new strategic innovation, discovery, exploring white space, extending beyond the existing core to turn thinking into real-world solutions.
Developing new business models: exploring different business model design and innovation. Building the business case to accelerate, change and (radically) alter the existing state in greater valued ways.
Finding opportunities for innovation and new growth: creating new value, disruptive and radical innovation, disrupting the market to create new growth, identifying and developing new markets and segments, optimizing new products, honing the incremental value, building bigger and better ideas that solve the customer need.
Catalytic thinking: Innovation can be the catalyst to a set of strategic questions and problems, providing a new scope through innovation, shifting perspectives and mindsets, and making different connections that lead to growth opportunities.
Knowing the emerging, leading and best practice of innovation: having the latest insights, awareness and understanding of trends and approaches through innovation and what this can possibly bring to existing thinking.
Recognizing innovation lifecycle management: organizing around different platforms, portfolios and approaches to enhancing the value of the investments made. Pinpointing, verifying and improving the ‘impact’ innovation can bring to the different stages
Accelerating and bringing change: critically exploring speed-to-market, execution, alignment, stretching and scaling accordingly, more fluid structures, asset utilization, using innovation as the positive change agent/ enabler.
Enhancing the quality of inventive intellectual thinking: leveraging the intellectual assets and the intangibles by enhancing knowledge sharing, transferring and the conversion strategies for improved deliverables and worth.
Strengthening the collaborating effect: through a growing need for greater networking, collaborations and changing relationship management techniques to broaden horizons and possibilities, reduce tensions and accelerate agreement and open up more informal innovation pathways.
Building innovation resources: access to concepts and theories, tools, templates, techniques and methodologies, research, inspiration, knowledge insights and critically links to related activities that feed off of innovation.
Leading clearly for innovation: insights on the role of top management and how innovation processes can be facilitated, developed and embedded through coaching, championing and facilitating. Turning aspiration into reality.
Management 2.0: is about reinventing innovation management for a new age, management model innovation, and management of innovation activity in general. Building innovation into the very fabric of the organisation.
Long–term innovation: the ability to embed a ‘sustaining innovation’ mindset, develop the environment for independent thinking and longer-term identification, seek out tomorrow’s pathway through a more holistic view, and grow more dependency on increased interactivity.

Care to add any I might have missed out, although I must admit this list is long enough as it stands.

By the way, they are not in any particular order.

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