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.
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.
The conceptual and complex nature of early discovery work requires a communication approach that is repetitive, iterative and crosses departmental boundaries. This rather time consuming approach may seem less efficient however, it has the benefit of producing higher quality product and service concepts.
