Do you plan your new product development like a missile strike?

A missile strike? Well, that sounds a bit aggressive, doesn’t it? But consider the two targeting steps you’d take in the military, before firing those missiles: 1) survey all possible enemy positions, and then 2) isolate the high-value targets. You should do the same in the front-end of innovation, before the development stage: “Step 1” is targeting customer needs with a divergent interview process (exploring all possible needs), and “Step 2” is convergent interviewing (focusing on the most important, unmet needs).

Many companies today fire their missiles and then visit the blast site to see if they happened to hit something. Crazy? Sure, but we’ve met with hundreds of B2B companies, and this is the typical approach. The good news is you can do much better.

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