By Michael Palmer
A good innovation exercise begins with diagnostics. That means assembling the right combination of customer needs (preferably the unmet kind) with competitive insights, those actions being taken by other players in your industry; plus an understanding of your company's own capabilities, all integrated with clear step-by-step protocols.
So to be successful you have to understand your customer, your competition, and your own capabilities then have a process for changing that information into real action. Marketers have gotten better at collecting insights (they still are not so good at codifying and disseminating those insights internally however) and understanding the competitive landscape. However, we still need help uncovering our organization’s DNA and building a protocol for initiating innovation.
The absence of good innovation protocols means that innovation teams often make up both what they will address and how they will address it—a prescription for failure. As Jim Collins outlined in Good to Great, defining an organization’s purpose, its reason for being or purpose, is critical to deciding what it can be best in. Coupling that known internal insight with tried and true best practices (knowing what works) will help you create an innovation routine that can double or triple your success rate versus suffer the current high failure rate (98%) most marketers experience currently.
Wish to learn how to become a more successful innovation organization? Tap in ANA School of Marketing and download our most recent Innovation Webinar; ask us to bring you a ½ day innovation workshop (complimentary for ANA member companies), or have us build you an innovation seminar. How we can help? Visit us online.
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