For years, Jonathan Cagan’s and Craig M. Vogel’s Creating Breakthrough Products has offered an indispensable roadmap for uncovering new opportunities, identifying what customers really value, and building products and services that redefine markets — or create entirely new markets. Now, the authors have thoroughly updated their classic book, adding new chapters on service design and global innovation, plus new insights, best practices, and case studies from both U.S. and global companies. Their new Second Edition compares revolutionary (Apple-style) and evolutionary (Disney-style) approaches to innovation, helping decision-makers choose between them, and make either one work. Cagan and Vogel provide more coverage of Value Opportunity Analysis and ethnography, as well as new case studies ranging from Navistar’s latest long-haul truck to P&G’s reinvention of Herbal Essence. Throughout, readers will find up-to-date insights into identifying Product Opportunity Gaps that can lead to enormous success; navigating the "Fuzzy Front End" of product development; and leveraging contributions from diverse product teams — while staying relentlessly focused on customers’ values and lifestyles, from strategy through execution. Using additional visual maps and illustrations, they’ve made their best-selling book even more intuitive and accessible to both industry and academic audiences.
Creating Breakthrough Products describes the new forces driving product development that companies must master if they want to lead and innovate. It is a step-by-step guide to the new ideal in product development.
Too many new products fail. New products which are hard to differentiate from existing products won't capture the customer's imagination. The failure is due to a poor understanding of customers' needs. Companies need to take a radical approach to identifying customers' real needs, and this book demonstrates innovative ways to achieve this.
Innovation Through Understandingsm The toughest part of innovation? Accurately predicting what customers want, need, and will pay for. Even if you ask them, they often can’t explain what they want. Now, there’s a breakthrough solution: Innovation Games. Drawing on his software product strategy and product management consulting experience, Luke Hohmann has created twelve games that help you uncover your customers’ true, hidden needs and desires. You’ll learn what each game will accomplish, why it works, and how to play it with customers. Then, Hohmann shows how to integrate the results into your product development processes, helping you focus your efforts, reduce your costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver the right solutions, right from the start. Learn how your customers define success Discover what customers don’t like about your offerings Uncover unspoken needs and breakthrough opportunities Understand where your offerings fit into your customers’ operations Clarify exactly how and when customers will use your product or service Deliver the right new features, and make better strategy decisions Increase empathy for the customers’ experience within your organization Improve the effectiveness of the sales and service organizations Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features Innovation Games will be indispensable for anyone who wants to drive more successful, customer-focused product development: product and R&D managers, CTOs and development leaders, marketers, and senior business executives alike.
A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations "Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation." -Clayton Christensen For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm--that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually. In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated. Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs," "benefits," "specifications," and "solutions," Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives. With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to: Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possible Recognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors do Identify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer value Systematically define breakthrough products and services concepts Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.
Companies are experiencing a shortage of game-changing ideas that drive growth. This is a 'how to' book about generating a steady stream of breakthrough new product ideas. Experts, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Edgett, provide an unbiased evaluation of the top 15+ ideation methods used by leading companies. This book explains how to 'feed' your innovation funnel with a steady stream of breakthrough new product ideas. Through numerous examples of the methods, approaches and techniques being used by leading companies such as Motorola and Procter and Gamble, the authors confirm the importance of a robust Discovery Stage and illustrate how to implement such a system. For more information, visit: www.stage-gate.com
“A journey into a powerful idea . . . the more people you involve as creators and contributors, the greater your innovation capacity.” —Polly LaBarre, New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Mavericks at Work Organizations need to offer customers breakthrough products, services, and solutions to effectively compete in today’s innovation-hungry economy. The challenge is customers often don’t know precisely what they want. As Henry Ford is reputed to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” To surprise and awe your customers, Chip Bell advises developing co-creation partnerships with them. Co-creation partnerships are about fulfilling customers’ hopes and aspirations, not just their needs and expectations. Co-creation partnerships require (1) curiosity that uncovers insight, (2) grounding that promotes clear focus, (3) discovery that fosters risk-taking, (4) trust that safeguards partnership purity, and (5) passion that inspires energized generosity. Using examples from organizations like McDonald’s, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, Bell shows how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer. “Innovation through partnership is the blueprint for business growth in the future. Inside Your Customer’s Imagination provides the instruction and inspiration to make it a success.”—Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times-bestselling author “Chip Bell’s unique perspective, lively illustrations, and practical advice result in one terrific resource for anyone eager to tap a customer’s ingenuity for creating breakthrough results.” —Jeanne Bliss, founder and CEO, CustomerBliss; and cofounder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)
More than 95% of all consumer product launched in the packaged goods sector fail to achieve their goals for success. Breakthrough Food Product Innovation Through Emotions Research gives a clear answer for innovation teams seeking to increase product success rates by breaking through the clutter in an otherwise undifferentiated, commoditized marketplace. Through case studies, it lays out a practical approach for applying emotions research throughout the food innovation and product development process. The basic premise is that emotions are the chief motivation for why consumers sense, select, seek and share their food product experiences. With this novel framework, the science of consumer behavior is made operational for innovation teams. Emotions insight inspires innovation teams to create and helps guide decision making as they design sensory cues and other behavior drivers into products that make consumers want to consume. This book has implications for the whole innovation team - innovators such as product developers, designers, creative chiefs, and marketers; strategists such as line managers; and researchers such as sensory and marketing researchers. - Presents a behaviour-driven approach to innovation for the development of breakthrough food products - Illustrates a collaborative framework to inspire creativity and guide decision making through emotions insights - Explores a research framework that gets to the "whys" of consumer behavior by distilling the science of emotions into research insights - Defines design and development methods to build sensory cues into packaging and packaged foods that deliver emotional impact - Explains research methods that get to the "so whats" of insights through emotions research - Provides case studies and examples proving the value of the behavior-driven approach to food product innovation
Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms. In this pioneering study, authors Abbie Griffin, Raymond L. Price, and Bruce A. Vojak detail who these serial innovators are and how they develop novel products, ranging from salt-free seasonings to improved electronics in companies such as Alberto Culver, Hewlett-Packard, and Procter & Gamble. Based on interviews with over 50 serial innovators and an even larger pool of their co-workers, managers and human resources teams, the authors reveal key insights about how to better understand, emulate, enable, support, and manage these unique and important individuals for long-term corporate success. Interestingly, the book finds that serial innovators are instrumental both in cases where firms are aware of clear market demands, and in scenarios when companies take risks on new investments, creating a consumer need. For over 25 years, research on innovation has taken the perspective that new product development can be managed like any other (complex) process of the firm. While a highly structured and closely supervised approach is helpful in creating incremental innovations, this book finds that it is not conducive to creating breakthrough innovations. The text argues that the drive to routinize innovation has gone too far; in fact, so far as to limit many mature firms' ability to create breakthrough innovations. In today's economy, with the future of so many large firms on the line, this book is a clarion call to businesses to rethink how to nurture and thrive on their innovative workforce.
