3… 2… 1… Stop.
You have three seconds to attract a potential customer to demonstrate that a new innovation serves a valuable purpose in their life.
This branding exercise does not need to be initiated after the product or service has already been created. Instead, how to communicate with potential customers should be part of the process of designing the innovation from the outset.
By using one of these recipes, anyone can innovate.
There are two popular methods for creating and refining innovations: Design Thinking and the Lean Startup Method. They share a few common steps: stating the assumptions about the customers, their needs, and their reactions to branding as testable, falsifiable hypotheses; and then getting out of the building to interact directly with these potential customers in an open, free-flowing discussion. This should avoid surveys or focus groups, since those tools typically rely on fixed possible responses or a script, which limit the possibility for hearing surprising, valuable insights from customers.These conversations help innovations confirm, reject or evolve their initial assumptions.
The Lean Startup Method has a few tools for ensuring that there are hypotheses for all of the major aspects of an innovation, including how it will generate revenue.
Design Thinking eventually get to hypothesis generation and testing, but starts with a more rigorous deliberate but time-consuming stage of ethnography – watching potential customers from afar – and iterative customer conversations to ensure that the innovators are leaving no idea unexplored.
When should innovators use one method instead of the other? The Lean Startup Method is typically faster and rougher. Moreover, it assumes that the potential customers already know what problem they have and how the innovation might help them. In contrast, Design Thinking is better when the customer and the innovator want to co-create an idea and reveal the problem during the conversation.
The true power of either method, however, is not just the outcome. By using one of these recipes, anyone can innovate. This vital activity is no longer just the domain of “creative” or “entrepreneurial” people. People who do think of themselves as having the skill to dream up an audacious new product can now be equal contributors to the process of creating innovation.
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Innovating with Impact by Ted Ladd and Alessandro Lanteri is available to order now.
