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| Move mouse over graphic elements to read more. Click any heading in the graph to visit a more detailed page. |
CEI-Star Methodology
Customer-Enhanced innovation is a unique and robust methodology that leads to breakthroughs in product, service. process and business model.
Mouse over the graphic for more details and links.
Major components include:
Customer Real Use
Observing customers using a product/service in their real environment can reveal problems in use that lead to fixes and innovation. Real environments are often darker or steeper or more complex, for example, than the environment in which products are conceived and developed. The interaction with the real environment can be critical.
The necessary multi-disciplinary teamwork to observe and decipher is as much art as science.
StarCustomersTM
Breakthroughs in business model concepts often come from new ways to organize the value stream, or to partner within it.
Dell created a new business model for selling computers, Amazon.com (books), Apple (music downloads) showed us how to use the Internet to bypass retail, and FedEx changed the game of mailing packages.
Most companies, however, evaluate new ideas through the lens of their current business model, and can't see the way to make a new business model as profitable as their current one. So it is often those outside the industry who provide the real breakthroughs.
Value Stream Partners
Partnering with customers and suppliers can open up opportunities for new products and services far beyond the limits of those created internally. Consider the auto industry where major shifts in design/ build are occurring.
Partnering for innovation is distinctly different from partnering to eliminate inefficiencies; as such it requires different preparation, mindset and management.
Lead User / Extreme User Solutions
Empirical research over 30 years, and across multiple industries, reveals that 11% to 100% of commercially important innovations are developed by lead users rather than by the manufacturer.
Research at 3M comparing on Lead User ideas found these to be more novel, to have greater potential to develop into an entire product line, and to have projected annual sates eight times higher than ideas from traditional methods.
NASA, Special Forces and race cars provide numerous solutions for others with less extreme conditions. So do square dancers, the hearing impaired and frequent fliers.
The challenge is to find the appropriate solutions from the right users, and to build on them in such a way as to legitimately own the result.Customer Desired Performance
Most customers can't define a solution they haven't experienced.
In areas where people are not intimately aware of a product, they tend to get stuck in the way products have been traditionally used.
The right customers can tell you what they want your products to do for them, even if they can't define the solution. The difference is critical, and requires far more than "listening to the voice of the customer" to decipher.
Strategy
Strategy and innovation are inextricably linked, with changes in either having potential implications for the other.
Strategy should differentiate, which requires innovation - but it must be the right innovation, or it may alter the intended strategy.
Solutions in Place
Typically companies look to their R&D group to create new products. While market research is often utilized to help guide this, such research typically targets the middle of the market and asks customers to evaluate alternatives R&D has considered.
There is another source of innovations that is too often neglected - in spite of research that shows it to be extremely fruitful in most industries researched. That is the concept of Lead Users (people who have experienced a problem in a particular area and already created a solution) or Extreme Users.
These sources account for 11% to 100% to of new products in most industries examined.
Customer Wants & Needs
lf any company knew the expressed and unexpressed wants and needs of both its current customers and potential customers, it would have the key to innovation. It would then have only to choose the most profitable of the ideas to implement.
Typically companies know most about expressed wants and needs of current customers. This is the category Least likely to lead to innovation.
We have developed a methodology that reveals expressed and unexpressed needs of both current customers and non-customers.
Partnering Opportunities
Context is the environment of circumstances, events and relationships within which a company exists. Some of the elements of context typically are hidden, some are misunderstood, some are ignored. Understanding the context better always reveals opportunities (and threats).
Contextual elements important to consider include:
The trend in % of overweight people globally will impact many products and companies. Food companies such as Frito-Lay that paid attention to this a year or two ago are far ahead of those just recognizing the impact e.g. Krispy Kreme).
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