Blog Category: Product Development

Fixate on the only source of unlimited potential, not sources of diminishing return.

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Unlike innovation, quality and productivity apply to current operations and yield diminishing returns. What do you do after you reach zero defects… or your factory is being run by the proverbial “man and a dog”? (The man feeds the dog; the dog bites the man if he touches the controls.) Customer-facing innovation is different. There is no limit. Just look at Apple Computer.

More in white paper, www.catchtheinnovationwave.com (page 2)

Stop Stifling B2B Organic Growth with 2nd Order Effects

What’s the next domino? Why business leaders should think about 2nd order effects

In a complex system—like your business—every action leads to a second-order effect (SOE). Some are unknowable. Others are easily predicted but routinely ignored by business leaders. We’ll explore success-stunting SOE’s you should avoid… and a 5th order plan for your B2B organic growth. A college student studies hard, gets good grades (second-order effect), and begins ... Read More

If you’re paying attention, you can’t miss the Innovation Wave.

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About 100 books on innovation are now written weekly… and 100 times as many articles on innovation are now published as in the 1970’s. So if you haven’t noticed, you might not be paying close attention. You know… like General Motors and Chrysler weren’t paying attention to Toyota and the Quality Wave in the 1970’s.

The good news is that your competitors may still be focused on initiatives other than whole-hearted, market-facing innovation. Like Toyota in the Quality Wave, you create a competitive advantage by moving faster and harder on this. More in 2-minute video, Catch the innovation wave.

More in white paper, Catch the Innovation Wave

Benchmarking for B2B Product Innovation

Benchmarking for B2B - Four Steps Needed for New Product Differentiation

While VOC is extremely important, the most overlooked practice in B2B product development today is competitive benchmarking. This should be done in the front-end of innovation using 4 steps: 1) Identify outcomes to benchmark, 2) Identify customers’ alternatives, 3) Identify test methods, and 4) Identify benchmark levels (how good is good enough?) ... Read More

If you like confirmation bias, you’ll love “validating hypotheses.”

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Think you can validate your new product concept with customers and avoid confirmation bias? Good luck with that. In your last performance review, did you agree with your boss’s praise more than his criticism? If so, you may not have overcome confirmation bias quite yet.

So if you want to avoid innovation malpractice, you need to stop leading the witness in interviews. Let them lead you to what really matters to them. My suggestion: Focus your customer interview on their desired outcomes. Then just check afterwards to see if their outcomes are a good match for your intended solution.

More in 2-minute video, Give your hypothesis the silent treatment

Profitable, sustainable organic growth makes it fun to go to work.

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When you can count on profitable, sustainable organic growth, everything gets better. Employees have stable, rewarding careers. Industry-watchers admire your company. Customers want to work with you. Activist investors bother someone else.  And it irritates competitors. What’s not to love?

But you have only one path to this type of growth. You must understand and meet customer needs better than others. How intense is your focus here? Is it greater than that of your competitors’? Or is your business distracted by other initiatives that can never deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable growth?

More in 2-minute video, Rethink your major initiatives

All great VOC interviews are alike; every unhappy interview is unhappy in its own way.

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With apologies to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina… all great voice-of-customer (VOC) interviews are alike in the same way: The customer is talking during most of the interview. And they are talking about those outcomes (desired end results) they want to talk about. Anything else is clutter, much of which leads to unhappiness.

For B2B voice-of-customer interviews, plan on two rounds of interview… first qualitative interviews (called Discovery), followed by quantitative interviews (called Preference). In both cases, the customers will be doing most of the talking… and about matters that interest them. They’ll be happy. You’ll be happy.

More in video, Reinventing VOC for B2B