Customer life-ways, a 5 part framework to build business product innovation.

Introduction to business product innovation:

Love innovation? It fuels the human spirit. It unleashes the process of discovery to build new things with the people and teams that are already at work in your company. I am beginning a new series on innovation to talk about the things business teams need to do to deliver it.

How do you create, with your products and digital content, the experiences and features that radiate with your customers? What features will energize them? What features will electrify them? What features will suggest and satisfy the desires of your customers that you can monetize? Get to the heart of your relationship with customers. Do you want to know the things that inspire them? Do you want to connect them to the features that you can build and deliver?

Understand value from their point of view. Understand their life-ways, their modes of interactions, their daily activities. Understand the nuts and bolts of what you offer and can build. Then create ecosystems of opportunity to fulfill on the promise of your brand-customer relationship. The desires and value points, as defined from your customers points of view, matter all along the paths of purchase, service, and experiencing your brand.

Empower something special for your customer. They won’t hesitate to keep on coming back. Light the path to excellence and deliver it. Here's how to get started.

Empower customer life-ways: A 5-part framework to start, sustain, and evaluate business innovation that matters.

1. Change

                Get ready to change and empower excellence at a higher level. What do you need to change now? What spark of insight do you carry from your last change initiative? What team members will light the path to build your innovation process, identify innovation gate-keepers, and sustain the innovation work through to successful completion?

2. Know

                What do you know about what delights your customers? How do your customer experience your products in the daily rhythms of their lives? What can you prove with evidence about how customers actually think about, use, and experience the things your industry has to offer?

3. Investigate

                Test your best insights about what value, platforms, and business models to build. Review innovations that your team (or competitors have tried.) Take a look at the features that seem to matter most to your audience all along the paths of purchase, service, and experience. Think through a testing and investigation regime. Let your team evaluate products and experiences that encompass all the lifeways of your customer from idea to product sample to fully engaged life-engaging products and services.

4. Relate

                Learn what your team is doing now, thinking now, and how they are interacting now with customers, insights, and one another. What processes and systems will take you from where you are today to where you need to be tomorrow? Stage-gate the steps to get to where you need to go. Engage your team with cutting edge insights, training, and empowered ways of business. Deliver 21st century models of business and service delivery systems and you will create more valuable products and experiences.

5. Kira

                Create ecosystems of products, services, and experiences that matter to your customers. Build to the customer life-ways that engage, empower, and transform their lives. When your customers' life-ways, their desires, their patterns, their security, and their comfort, are met and addressed by your products, the Kira, the holistic health (in Kirundi) of your business system will expand.

Inspiration, opportunity, and ecosystems for customers, they are the work of 21st century businesses. Make your products matter. Make your products reflect and integrate in the life-ways of your customers. Connect the people, grow the people, inspire the people with your products and you will achieve a higher level of business. In other words, become the partner for your customers to achieve their next right steps on the road to a better life. They will thank you with their repeating, sustaining, engaged, and delighted business relationships.

-Chuck Kirkpatrick
[email protected]