Why innovation is a contact sport, not a thought process

Innovation success can seem to materialise at random. An idea that sparked excitement around the boardroom table might fall flat outside of the team’s creative bubble. We can survey customers asking them what they want, build precisely what they ask for, and still watch our ideas be met with indifference. 

While we know that failure is an important (and dare I say ‘necessary’) part of the innovation process, the good news is that there are some things we can do to minimise the guesswork. Below are four strategies to help you unlock genuine customer interest in your innovation. 

Kill off your zombies

The first step to creating innovation your customers love is to kill off the stuff they don’t. It’s time to kill your zombies; a term coined by Global Strategy and Innovation consultancy, Innosight. Zombies refer to those initiatives that fail to fulfill their promise, yet shamble along draining resources from more promising innovation. 

When you’re looking for zombies, it’s important to take an objective view across your entire portfolio. You’re looking for initiatives that:

• Only yield marginal returns yet sap significant resources
• No longer align to your customer’s needs
• No longer play to your organisation’s core strengths and competencies

Once you’ve identified your zombies it’s time to muster the courage to kill them. Warning: this can hurt! Yet it will free up resources that you can redirect to ideas that create true customer value.

Step into your customer’s shoes

If you want to captivate your customers, then it’s time to walk in their shoes. If you can’t recall the last time you went through your customer’s process; doing as your customers do, experiencing their pain points, then it’s time to re-immerse yourself in their world.

How? Spend time observing your customers (in a non-stalkerish kind of way) and make note of anything surprising or unexpected. Listen in on customer conversations to learn more about their frustrations and motivations. Go through your sales process and consume your products and services.

Building deep customer empathy ensures that you can pinpoint the most compelling customer problems and solve them in relevant and meaningful ways. And it’s almost guaranteed to spark new customer-centric ideas.

Pay attention to your customer’s frustrations

According to Clayton Christensen’s ‘Jobs To Be Done’ Theory, customers hire products and services to do specific jobs for them. And it’s up to us to identify which jobs our customers hire us for, and to solve those jobs better than anyone else.

‘Frustrations’ are a clue to uncovering your customer’s most important ‘jobs’, as they indicate that something’s not quite right and that a job is not being serviced. Therefore, we should try to view them as a golden nugget of insight. Once you know your customer’s biggest frustrations, then it’s time to unearth the unsatisfied job that sits behind them. The frustrations are just a symptom, but the challenge is to get to the cause. This is where the true insight lies and is the starting point for creating captivating innovation.

Run rapid experiments

Ultimately, we can’t know how our customers will react to our ideas until they’re in front of them. And we can’t ask customers if they’ll use our innovation at some distant time in the future because they don’t know. (Research has shown that people’s intentions about their future behaviour are pretty unreliable). All this means that the success of our ideas is anchored in a whole lot of uncertainty, and this can feel scary. 

This is where experimentation can help. Rapid experimentation allows you to identify the riskiest aspects of your idea and then prove (or disprove them) one experiment at a time. This approach means that you’re able to refine and iterate your ideas based on direct customer feedback. And it allows you to build knowledge on what resonates with your customers (and what doesn’t) without big upfront bets that might never pay off. So, you’re putting your best foot forward.

Someone once said to me that “innovation is a contact sport, not a thought exercise”. It requires us to get out from behind our desks and get our hands dirty. How do you do this? Kill tired offerings to free up resources, develop deep customer empathy, delve behind your customer’s frustrations, and equip your team with the skills to test ideas through experimentation. And instead of crossing your fingers, you’ll be delivering a constant flow of innovation that captivates your customers.

Zoe Aitken is the head of consulting at Inventium.