Innovation

Opportunity Discovery phase helps you determine the different needs that exist for each customer persona within your sandbox. There are 4 steps that can help you identify the opportunity by figuring out all of the actions that are being taken in the journey of a particular job, then you hypothesize where you might make an impact leveraging your company’s existing competitive advantages. You test whether these ideas positively impact the job, if the customer cares, and whether there’s a viable business model using rapid experimentation, e.g. Lean Startup.

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The trap that many corporations fall into is the belief that digital transformation is mostly a technological thing. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as there’s a human side to digital transformation. And while technology is disruptive to the business, it is not disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is a purposeful re-imagining of how you structure and manage your work. It's recognizing that the real disruptions are external to the company, mostly in the form of pandemics, war, ransomware attacks, supply shocks, energy grid collapses, etc.

So the question becomes: how do you drive disruptive innovation? Start exploring within the core?

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In established businesses, leaders and employees assume the blueprint they use to execute on the business is fixed. But as the last few years demonstrate, little is fixed. Pandemic, war, supply chain issues, ransomware attacks, inflation–it’s crazy out there! All these events ripple across the business landscape, disrupting the markets. The blueprint maybe doesn’t work anymore.

How do you fix that?

we need to double down on understanding our customers deeply in order to build products that provide value. Old market research techniques just aren’t effective in the face of massive uncertainty. Product managers should be out doing this. Designers should be out doing this. Engineers should be going along for the ride. Build exploration into your regular work to improve efficiency of execution. Running experiments helps reduce risk and waste, not to mention that it provides real-world data to enable high-confidence decision-making.

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On this episode of Disruption Proof, we're discussing uncertainty in the market and how to go about it. The default nature of a new business is . There is no blueprint yet for building, marketing, selling and delivering new value for customers. The first step is (or ought to be) understanding the market needs. This requires interviewing potential customers and running experiments all before building any of it. In this episode, you'll learn how to undergo this exploration.

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This podcast covers, what is opportunity discovery and what it means to find new opportunities within your organization.

The goal of the book Disruption Proof is to help leaders and founders of companies to create what I call RAD companies, which stands for being resilient, aware, and dynamic. RAD requires new behaviors and skills for all, while also establishing new systems, processes, and structure to deal with an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

RAD companies are necessary to survive and thrive in the Digital Age. Many of the trends we see in business–increasing diversity, agile practices, developing empathy, running experiments–are in response to the complexity and uncertainty in our sociopolitical, economic, and working environments.

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Do companies know how to innovate? Should innovation be part of an individual’s job title? Should it be in a job description? Does a company even need to innovate? Most big companies think technology when thinking about innovation, regardless of whether or not they’re technology companies. Startups are often considered to be de facto innovators, but is that the case?

Wars, technological advances, the pandemic, social, and political turmoil have led to businesses facing disruption on an ongoing basis. As technology innovation has moved to the edge, technical risk is less problematic than market risk. The risk to business is less “can we build the product” than “should we?” Customer insights represent an important and vastly under-appreciated intellectual capital versus, say, patents. Businesses must be closer to the customer; understand them deeper. They must be able to respond to change. Overall, companies must be nimble and move fast.

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Disruption is happening, and we can’t stop it—it's part of the shift from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age. We can, however, learn and adapt in order to survive and thrive. We can do this by thinking like entrepreneurs, in other words, learning before executing. To behave in this way, however, requires new leadership skills and benefits from alternative organizational structure.

Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you and what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation “No One Cares” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.

Brad D. Smith, Executive Chairman of the Board of Intuit, shares his lessons in leadership and the role of a CEO in nurturing innovation. He talks about developing a Founder's mindset, the importance of creating a learning environment where people treat success and failure the same way, and how to deliver the numbers today and reimagine the company for the future.

Stephen Ranjan, Vice President of New Product Development at Roche Diabetes Care shares how leaders and teams there are overcoming the unique challenges of innovating in healthcare despite the global pandemic. He shares how they built new capabilities to explore the needs of underserved customer segments and develop solutions at speed in a regulated environment.

In this episode, we are joined by Michelle Brigman, Director of Customer Experience at 7-Eleven. Michelle shares how, in the face of the global pandemic, 7-Eleven quickly shifted to ensure their over 68,000 store owners and franchisees could continue to meet their customers’ needs. She also provides insight into 7-Eleven’s COVID19 Command Center and how they use this to rapidly collect and respond to insights gained from all parts of their business.

Learn how Roche Diabetes Care used Lean Innovation to reinvent themselves to better address disruptive forces in Diabetes Care.  Moritz Hartmann, head of the Roche Information Solutions shares his leadership lessons learned throughout this journey driving transformation in the highly regulated medical devices industry.