Information demands on accounting and finance departments have grown exponentially over the past decade. It is no longer good enough to close the books a few weeks after month-end. Today, the critical work in finance and accounting is done after the financial statements are prepared. An inability to keep up with these new demands can put professionals out of work and companies out of business.
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.
