Time out - Planning for growth may be an offline activity.
It is hard enough to keep your customers satisfied, the plant running efficiently and your suppliers on schedule. On top of all that, how can you profitably grow the business? Here is one method to kick-start the process.
There is great comfort in buying into a specific process to manage innovation.
Walter Isaacson articulated how the concept of ‘bending reality’ helped Steve Jobs push for breakthrough innovations at Apple. This approach is also sometimes covered through the concept of stretch goals.
We regularly notice a gap between business organizations and their customers. One source of this chasm comes from an assumption that we already know how customers think. There is a sense that managers can perfectly role-play their customers. We often believe we know what our customers want.
One objective of innovation processes such as Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI), Voice of the Customer (VOC) or Lean Product Development (Lean PD) is to bring more reliability to a highly conceptual and ambiguous environment. These tools can also promote an environment that focuses exclusively on inductive and deductive logic. These styles of reasoning rely on rules and data to predict future outcomes. To balance this analytical approach to innovation an intuitive reasoning process is essential. Intuitive reasoning is known in some circles as abductive reasoning.
