The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System, and Processes (Stanford Briefs) by Edward Hess & Jeanne Liedtka

Author:Edward Hess & Jeanne Liedtka [Hess, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-05-23T14:00:00+00:00

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Source: From Designing for Growth by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie. Copyright 2011 Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.

The Two Stages of Idea Generation

Stage 1: Discovery

Since the goal of innovation is to envision and implement a new future, it is always tempting to start the search for new ideas there. Many businesspeople believe that innovation starts with brainstorming. But it actually starts in the here and now. This is where the search is most likely to be fruitful, in a place that scientist Stuart Kauffman called “the adjacent possible.”7 Johnson describes it as “a shadow future hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”8

This is often difficult for busy, hard-pressed managers to accept. First, it seems as though starting our search for the future in the present will doom us to incremental change. Not so, if we ask the right questions (more on this shortly). Second, businesspeople tend to want to jump to answers very early in the process of looking for new ideas. Unfortunately, those top-of-mind solutions are often based on preconceived notions about what customers want or what competitors are doing. Innovative ideas that provide the best opportunity for differentiation and superior profitability come from deep insights about customers’ current reality. Without those insights, the imagination has little to work with.

The quality of the discovery process determines, to a significant degree, the quality of your growth ideas—this is where growth initiatives are won or lost. This first stage sets the foundation for success.

Discovery starts with the customer’s current reality aTnd looks through his or her eyes. Despite our avowed passion for being “customer focused,” in many situations this comes down to trying to shove existing products more effectively at customers using a variety of segmentation schemes and emotional advertising. For the managers we studied who were succeeding at growth, it means something quite different—being deeply interested in the details of customers’ lives as people, not categories. Remember the story in Chapter 2 about the manager who told us that he had abandoned being “customer-centric” in favor of being “Cynthia-centric”? That is what we are talking about. So it is time to stop advocating and start practicing those inquiry skills we talked about.

The reason why talking to customers so often seems like an innovation dead end is because we ask them the wrong question: “What do you want?” Human beings, sadly, are notorious for being unable to envision something they haven’t seen yet, so not surprisingly, their answers usually take the form of “me too” products and incremental enhancements (and that is after they give up on asking for lower prices). This is why Tom Peters called the customer “a rearview mirror.”9

During discovery we are going to ask our Cynthia a set of questions focused on the job she is trying to get done, the outcomes she wants to produce (including the metrics she uses to measure them), and the constraints she faces.

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