internal difficulties for innovation - Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence

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.

*******

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.

The post Tackling the internal Jobs-to-be-done for improving Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Questioning internally those many product failures

@paul4innovating — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:51:56 +0000

There is a variety of different views on our product failure rates. According to some, the failure rate for new products launched for instance in the grocery sector is 70 to 80 per cent in the US. For smaller US food businesses launching new products, the success rate is even lower around 11 per cent.

These are really high failure rates but is this a myth or reality? How does your organization evaluate product failures? Do you really want to talk about them?

Organizations continue to push for business growth by launching wave upon wave of new products, yet many end up as just hardly ripples. We seem to have this NPD ‘bug’ of wanting to constantly innovate, it is required, expected and keeps our organization’s teams of developers and marketing groups gainfully employed. Yet we continue to have poor product rates of return. Why?

Researching new product failure is fairly hard to cut through fact and fiction

Recently I was asked to research into these failure rates, the part of the broader question was interesting, in trying to understand this continually high failure rate, as it is claimed we have advanced significantly with our innovation understanding, structures and research techniques to understand market and customer needs, yet we still have, it seems, the same ongoing failure rates. Why?

Firstly getting at definitive failure rates really can be one of those “it depends” replies. Not just which industry you are in but which market, which segment within the market, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to build, defend or advance etc., etc. It gets incredibly complex to give a baseline to failure; apart from it does seem unacceptably high.

Four strands of insight seem to reflect some measurement ‘sense’ of failure

Firstly, I liked one view here provided through the PDMA: “often new product ideas are not developed and the majority of new products never make it to market. Consider these two interesting statistics: 1) New products have a failure rate of 25 per cent to 45 per cent; and 2) For every seven new product ideas, about four enter development, one and a half are launched, and only one succeeds”.

Secondly, according to Booz & Company, they report that 66 per cent of new products fail within two years.

Thirdly, the Doblin Group reckons a startling 96 per cent of all innovations fail to return their cost of capital.

Fourthly, this makes product development very sobering. Few product introductions, for instance, within the food and beverage categories, are blockbusters. Companies in mature industries often must find another way to make a splash. Only 1% of new product launches reached $100 million or more in sales revenues in their first year (Bain & Co in a report back in 2008). I doubt it has got any easier, most probably a lot harder since then!

Each of these failure rates speaks to me

Each of these four metrics has given a clear qualification to failure rates. Failure is qualified and framed.

Yet it grows in my mind so often that our failure rates are not to do with the market or customer acceptance but the very poor ways we conduct new product development within many of our organizations. How we manage innovation internally can contribute to market success or failure.

Much of our failure might lie with us, not the market
We seem to have five really big internal failure points, let me call this the internal “magic five” that have hidden within them the common problems that might be stopping organizations from improving their internal npd rates.

1. Innovation Execution

The high level of products that miss launch dates is often due to a lack of dedicated time and resources assigned to execution. It simply leaves the product at the factory gate, not having the dedicated focus and gaining the attention it needs in the marketplace. You hit the rocky road of execution as Innovation execution is not a smooth process, it is full of surprises, Innovation is serendipitous, full of fortunate discoveries, and often you stumble across something that takes it further forward and these need dedicated attention.

How often does your innovation execution lacks momentum, as suddenly all that necessary energy dissipates and falls away, what started as a bang ended with a whimper as resources get pulled due to the mistake that “job done” was when the product rolled off the production line. You really need to have as much leadership and attention immersed in the deployment zone of execution but we often fail to recognize this.

2. Too Few Good Impactful Ideas

How many times have you got caught up in that ongoing debate on ideas, the quest for many required by a (stupid) metric, clashing with top managers who need to find and fund those higher-value projects that have real value impact? The hyping up in tensions this can have internally, staking the future on some personal bets, padding out others to meet yet another metric, of products launched in the year.

Also, some organizations get caught up in that underlying ‘push’ to introduce increasingly more incremental products to offset underperformance. The lack of clear criteria on what will be supported and why, or those that work the idea so as to ‘massage’ the numbers up to get it into the next stage of the pipeline. Idea Management needs clear, concise governance and well-thought-through metrics to deliver against and that is NOT ideas, for idea’s sake!

3. Lack of Alignment
The alignment of product innovations to areas of strategic focus is one issue but then even if they are aligned, the organization fails to allocate and connect the need to make the appropriate resource allocation to deliver. This gap of alignment between strategy and product development activity is one of the real gaps as they are internally driven and not customer alignment driven.

To get closer to achieving alignment of strategic needs and our innovation outcomes, we need an overarching strategic design, to reduce the ‘disconnects’. Innovation needs constant alignment. One essential need is to provide a well-designed strategic plan that will allow the connections needed. We need to seek out alignment through clarification, through talking to each other, by working explicitly from the ‘same page.’ Putting together alignment and objectives need a specific design.

4. Portfolio “Placing Bad Bets”
The feelings, instincts, and personal favourites often get the favoured resources but are they ‘grounded’ on exact customer needs? No, more personal beliefs, and in the end, precious resources are wasted on unsuccessful products.

Do we actually do product profitability evaluations one or two years later to encourage the culling and learning from our product launches? How can you promote a more careful evaluation of innovation practices, striving to eliminate variances yet guard against that relentless pursuit to reduce the failures?

We need to guard against acquiring that prevailing risk mitigation mindset with the idea of standardising and simplifying, validating through increased data verification and mining, striving for benchmarking and searching for best practices.

These ‘good practice intentions’ seem to go nicely with placing the innovation bets on increasing the incremental activities, all to the detriment of seeking out more radical innovation. If one type of innovation prevails and begins to dominate, the risks of not providing for a healthy future increase. We begin to lose our abilities to be responsive and flexible.

We lose our agility to respond to changes in our markets, we are beginning to ossify our innovation, and ending up with ‘no good bets’ means you are placing no decent bets for your future health. Managing the innovation portfolio well can be the difference between success and failure.

5. Product development remains often ego-driven

Many responsible for new product development seem to suffer a selective perception, full of wishful thinking and optimism which can lead to biases in the direction of their wants. There is this growing internal trait to become predisposed and think of ‘our’ ideas in terms of product success, not a product failure.

We overestimate, interpret evidence to meet our wants and forget to keep going back to focus on the needs of our customers. A much harder place to focus upon and stay determined to deliver to. I repeat “are we internally driven and not customer alignment driven and do our egos get in the way?”

Product failure might lie far more internally than we are prepared to admit
Uncomfortable as it is there is a time to call into question the lack of a decent set of values that our innovation governance should be tackling.

I’d argue we are failing ourselves as much as we are failing our customers, when products don’t live up to the promise that was originally intended, as identified and needed, they just seems to somehow get lost in internal compromise and product development failure.

It does seem how we are managing innovation internally has a large part to play in the present contributing to market success or failure and that needs addressing.

****

The post Questioning internally those many product failures first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Often we can’t self-disrupt as we feel constrained

@paul4innovating — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:36:09 +0000

In the past few days I enjoyed listening to a webinar by Clayton Christensen and Max Wessel for the Forum for Growth and Innovation, a Harvard Business School research centre initiative that confirms to me we struggle to self-disrupt often and become constrained in ourselves.

The Forum for Growth and Innovation seeks to develop “breakthrough theories to help businesses become more successful innovators and create new, robust sources of growth”. The webinar was all around surviving disruption but discussed also “looking beyond the horizons”.

The Theory of Disruptive Innovation

To offer a quote from the Forums own website (www.thefgi.net.): “Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors”.

“An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.

Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics”.

The webinar raised in my mind many unanswered questions.
Central to the thinking for disruptive innovation is to address the jobs-to-be-done. Another nice piece that describes Clayton Christensen’s work in this area of JTBD is here. This seemingly simple idea has profound implications for re-framing industries.

Well in many of my unanswered questions there are some JTBD aspects clearly to this as well. Still that is another story for another day.

One question I had was this:

“Why do we have internal difficulties to self-disrupt?”
In most cases, organizations are not able to self-disrupt and this is largely covered by this veritable list of constraints. So I set about thinking about what these could be, here is my rather ‘stark’ list, can you think of any more?

Organizations often are far too close to existing markets to recognize that they are actually shifting; they ignore or miss the signs in many ways.
They get so fixed on their own perceptions they don’t see change coming – often until it is too late and have lost that intuitive, entrepreneurial touch within the mix.
They have invested too much, they hang on, often reducing prices, pushing more volume into the markets, crank out even more “extras” to try and off set change.
Organizations are full of rigidities, rules, procedures, processes and personalities and often no one is prepared to put their hand up to challenge the present paradigm.
The reinforcing values are just plain tough to change, you need dynamite to shift these
The people within organizations love the comfort of the nest they have built around themselves, who wants to bail out and expose themselves?
The processes become overburdening, hard to change, far too complex to change without significant commitment and top management support
Cultures are wonderful things but the dark side is they can stifle and constrain far more than promote and let free.
Leadership is locked into the strategy, tied into compensation on delivery on the existing, not on the preferred, far more radical, risky alternatives
Organizations, especially large ones are less than nimble, they fail to adapt and respond quickly enough – they prefer to double-down’ with more of the same but faster, leaner and more determined than ever, missing the real dangers occurring under their noses
Today, we are putting more and more of our organizations into boxes, they are becoming highly structured and specialized to maximise effectiveness and efficiency.
Markets are more global, faster, and fiercer to compete in, often organizations are reluctant to explore and experiment with new business models, or push into adjacencies for fear.
Lastly it does not matter how hard many organizations try, they lack real intelligence in market and customer needs, hence why the jobs-to-be-done is one essential component.

While all these stay in place, or not recognized as inhibitors to your own disruption capabilities, it is not surprising it is in the end those up and coming usurpers, the nimble and unencumbered, that thrive and begin to disrupt. You simply struggle when you leave it to late- your organization needs to resolve many of the above issues before it is ever capable of responding.

Look more in than out – that is where your danger often lies
Sometimes we are spending all those significant efforts scanning the horizon for the next big disruptive ‘thing’ but in the end it is the internal difficulties that ensure it is ignored until it is too little, too late. Work on the warning signs daily.

“Perpetuating history”, as Clayton Christensen would certainly say, “simply opens the doors to disruptive innovation”. We need to really recognize ALL the symptoms on why we can’t internally self-disrupt.

Surviving disruption is something we all need to take the survival course on, so we all can recognize and deal with its introduction and constant threat to total disorder and multiple impact points upon our business.

Watch out, disruption is all around us.

The post Often we can’t self-disrupt as we feel constrained first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.