World Famous Comics: What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
By: Anthony Ulwick Publisher: McGraw-Hill Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: McGraw-Hill Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 256 Publication Date: August 16, 2005
A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations
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"Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation."
. -Clayton Christensen
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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.
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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.
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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 And Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to:
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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 .
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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.
The real deal. This is how you should focus on customer needs. Lots has been published on the Voice of the Customer and being Customer/Market Driven, but little has really been published oh HOW to do it. (The author actually trashes this concept in the book) I applaud Mr Ulwick for this easy and simple way to look at viewing customer needs as Jobs, and the metrics for expectations as Outcomes. The concepts and the examples are excellent.
It follows a similar method as the old QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and House of Quality charts, but in a less dry and a less engineering-oriented approach.
It was very engaging book to read, and even if you never intend on going the whole nine yards using the methodology, you will be enlightened as to how to approach discussions with your customers on new product/feature ideas.
Mark B. This is a very good book - a good source to build the front end on.
Simple and Disciplined Approach to Obtaining Customers' Wants This is an excellent book that lays out a simple but disciplined approach to capturing what customers' want. With all the sources out there communicating how to do the voice of the customer, this book starts off by challenging that approach as being ineffective and then lays out what the author proposes as a better approach through the understanding of the customers' jobs that they are trying to perform, the outcomes (or key metrics that they use to measure how well a product or service completes a job) and the opportunities or those outcomes that are either underserved or overserved. The opportunities are the areas that a company should focus on to be successful in innovation. The author does this by sharing examples from different organizations that resulted in success. All in all a very refreshing approach to focusing on the customer and worth the read for all the innovators out there.
Purpose for Gathering Voice of the Customer (VOC) Data Proposes a different purpose for gathering VOC -- that is, focusing on the customer's desired "outcome" of the job to be accomplished. I was very delighted to read about this approach since it allows more objectivity in designing final solutions. However, it appears the author fails to capture that this is infact VOC data collection. Students of Six Sigma know that VOC data collection is not about writing down what the customer "says". It is about uncovering true "needs" (or whatever term you want to use) directly from the customer and not some secondary party ill-equiped to articulate those "needs".
Good but not great If you are new to market research or product innovation, this book is practical and easy to read and I recommend it. No need to read further in my comment. For the more experienced reader: As a businessperson, I was disappointed in this book. At first I was carried away; Ulwick is a good writer. I was so excited, I restared the book and took notes. That is when I realized that this is essentially a marketing tool for his company. Ulwich doesn't give insight into how to find the "50-150" criteria he mentions beyond saying that good marketing researchers are important. Furthermore his comments about customer-driven innovation are incorrect. While I agree with him that many companies behave as he describes, this is because, as with other business tools/concepts, customer-driven innovation is misunderstand and misused. Most of what he talks about is identical to what I tell employees during training. What I got out of this book was a handful of sentences about focusing on the job your customer needs done, the constraints and the criteria by which customers will measure your "solution".
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
