The 4 horsemen of the innovation apocalypse.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are a biblical rendition of dramatic and symbolic warnings of the death and destruction to occur at the end of days.

The four riders represent conquest, the violence of warfare, famine, and widespread death. What's the link with innovation?

Let's consider the following definitions:

• Conquest: the battle for market share. Big brands compete on a daily basis for growth.
• The violence of warfare: the internal political structures and the way innovation decisions are made based on expertise, gut feeling, and highest-paid opinions.
• Famine: the growing hunger of the customer base for more adequate solutions to their problems and a slimming room for error for big brands.
• Widespread death: the 75% of new products and services that fail, one year after launch.

"????????????????? ???? ??????????????????!"- Someone staring at a blank sheet of paper, out of ideas.

Well...it's even more difficult to come up with new ideas on a regular and structured basis. The success of innovation is determined by a plethora of elements, including whether or not there is genuine market demand, whether or not consumers will accept the new idea, and whether or not customers will pay for your solution to their problems. Even if you ignore external factors, you still have a lot of internal concerns to answer: Are you picking the proper ideas to pursue? Do you have the relevant people on your team? Is there a suitable supervision structure in place?

We've discovered four typical hazards among firms seeking innovation in our experience working with a variety of customers on innovation projects:

1. They overlook the user.
2. They are obsessing over their concepts.
3. They are fixated on perfection at the expense of learning.
4. They think of innovation as a 'spur of the moment' thing.

HORSEMAN 1: FORGETTING THE USER

Quite frequently, when pushing innovation, corporations fail to consider their consumers. They don't do it on purpose; they believe they know who their consumers are and what they require. Rather, they commit one of two mistakes of negligence. Either they jump to conclusions about users without testing the underlying assumptions, or they mix user demands with personal interests.

Both are serious errors because a lack of awareness of customer needs has a direct influence on the entire innovation process. Even the greatest product will fail miserably if user needs are not adequately understood. Consider consumer-oriented AR wearables: despite its technological prowess, the product failed because it required consumers to wear special spectacles to go about their day, potentially causing eye fatigue, headaches, and context distraction. Preoccupied with the question 'could we?' instead of the question 'should we?'. Consider the Segway, which failed to revolutionize personal mobility by overlooking key components of how and why people commute. The motto, "Knowing customer needs is fundamental to the innovation process," exemplifies the significance of understanding?problem contexts.

THE SOLUTION: BETTER USER INSIGHTS

"Get out of the building" as one product management cliché goes, implying that you must spend time with consumers if you want to understand their needs. This can take many different forms, ranging from anthropological observational studies to one-on-one consumer interviews, panel discussions, and customer surveys. (A combination of qualitative and quantitative research is generally encouraged.) Before you resort to solutions, do some research to make sure you're dealing with the appropriate problems for your consumers, which may save you a lot of time (and budget) in the long run. Furthermore, it allows you to create a virtual 'save point' in your innovation process. (that's a story for another time)

HORSEMAN 2: FALLING IN LOVE WITH IDEAS

We're frequently asked to assist businesses with validating their unique ideas with conversion or smoke tests, only to discover that the concepts haven't been thoroughly explored. In many situations, the explanation is that corporate executives fall into the trap of clinging to the concepts that they personally find most appealing—and love, as Shakespeare once said, is blind. In the context of innovation, this implies that businesses either commit to ideas they like without first assessing their desirability, viability, and feasibility. They most likely disregard key evidence that brings such ideas into question (confirmation bias). If left unchecked, this can result in squandered funds and innovations that never find traction in the market.

THE SOLUTION: FOCUSED IDEATION

I gave it away before, but solid innovation occurs when desirability, feasibility, and viability all come together. To put it another way, brilliant ideas aren't enough; successful innovations must also suit the needs of their consumers (desirability), be implementable (feasibility), and have the potential to be lucrative in the long run (viability). With this in mind, when we collaborate with corporations on innovation, we urge them to validate their prospective breakthroughs from all three perspectives before committing resources and time to them.?

Regardless of how plausible or viable a concept is, if it does not resonate with consumers, it will fail. On the viability side of the equation, we use Ash Maurya's (Running Lean) lean canvas model, which is based on Alex Osterwalder's business model canvas (Business Model Generation). The lean canvas puts an idea's whole business model on one page, allowing its components (such as target consumers, expenses, income streams, value proposition, and so on) to be readily tested and verified but differs from the business model canvas because of it's 'problem' component. Additionally, the Focus Framework by Justin Wilcox can help you identify early adopters and focus on the right customer needs.

HORSEMAN 3: SEEKING PERFECTION

Even organizations that have properly researched their innovations have difficulty effectively bringing solutions to market. This problem is sometimes linked to a choice to utilize a "big bang" product launch approach—a single release of a completely developed product—when pursuing innovation. While there are times when such a strategy is acceptable, the risk of pursuing innovation is that it can result in a loss of time, energy, and money since organizations miss out on an important chance to learn from the market they aim to serve. While established industry leaders spend months or years developing a "perfect" product and navigating corporate bureaucracy for approvals, they risk enabling new companies to seize their market with far less perfect but nonetheless useful products.

Eastman Kodak, which had a near-monopoly in analog photography and pioneered digital photography in the 1970s, was late to market with a consumer digital camera and therefore considerable market share.

THE SOLUTION: RAPID PRODUCT ITERATION

No matter how much research has been conducted prior to the creation of a concept, there is always more to be learned from real users. That is why, particularly in the innovation sphere, we advocate for smaller, more regular product releases versus bigger, less frequent ones. We urge firms to issue tiny first releases fast in order to learn from the market, rather than investing in bigger, full-featured releases, which would postpone input from a customer audience. Before investing in full functionality, organizations should test the market with a tiny release to see what works, what doesn't, and what needs to be altered. Dropbox is an excellent example: The company didn’t invest in creating their file-syncing platform until they had first demonstrated public interest using a simple product demo.

Rapid product iterations where decisions are based on data are the bread and butter of agile innovation.

Installing design sprints as a modus operandi to speed up innovation is a great idea in theory, but with customer validation playing such a vital role in the way we (should) make decisions, it becomes a difficult structure to put into practice. At BUFFL, we see Agile Validation as the missing link to be able to have effective design sprints.

HORSEMAN 4: AD HOC INNOVATION

Many of the firms we've worked with don't have a framework in place to act on innovation in a methodical way. Arbitrary innovation occurs rather than being organized as part of ongoing procedures. As new ideas emerge, one-time projects are initiated to develop them. This strategy is dangerous for a number of reasons. For starters, firms that seek innovation on the spur of the moment may not be well-structured to handle innovation activities. Second, if the information is not properly shared across subsequent project teams, organizations may miss out on opportunities to continuously enhance their execution of innovation initiatives. Finally, firms may completely lose out on crucial innovation opportunities because they do not think about innovation on a frequent basis.

THE SOLUTION: SYSTEMATIC INNOVATION INTEGRATION

There has been a large number of studies done on the value of approaching innovation as an investment portfolio rather than a sequence of creative endeavors. In the 2012 Harvard Business Review article "Managing Your Innovation Portfolio," Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff advocated for companies to maintain a portfolio of smaller "core" innovations related to existing products, larger "adjacent" innovations that expand on existing products, and larger-still "transformational" innovations that could create new markets. (often defined as Horizons 1, 2 , and 3)

We broaden the concept of innovation inclusion to incorporate not only the strategy for pursuing innovations but also how innovation initiatives are carried out inside the organization. For example, we assist leading corporates across a multitude of markets in establishing a labs organization dedicated to pursuing innovation, which entailed not only defining the overall innovation strategy, but also how ideas would be selected for consideration, who would participate, and how projects would be evaluated. Typically, our work entails answering the following questions:

• How do fresh innovation ideas emerge? Who is responsible?
• How are ideas evaluated? Who is responsible?
• How are projects financed based on ideas?
• What methods are used to manage innovation projects?
• How are new innovations brought to market?
• What criteria are used to evaluate innovative projects? Who is responsible?
• How are new inventions incorporated into business operations?
• How is validation installed as an asset? Who is responsible?

Answering these issues often necessitates the creation of a company-specific innovation framework, which may involve modifications to processes and resources. The benefit, on the other hand, is increased trust in the company's ability to successfully respond to market developments and create new business models, use fresh technologies and consider new approaches to grow.??

While innovation is difficult, avoiding the four dangers listed above will boost your chances of success. Identifying customer requirements, actively screening ideas, iterating on products based on market learnings, and making innovation an integral component of business operations will reduce the likelihood of new inventions failing in the marketplace.

GET INNOVATION HELP ???

BUFFL helps leading brands avoid common innovation validation pitfalls. We partner with companies at every stage of the innovation process, from strategy to problem definition to ideation and implementation. We're confident that we can help your company innovate more effectively, let’s start a conversation. ???