@paul4innovating

Widen the aperture, narrow the focus

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widen-the-aperture-narrow-the-focus-real-value

Today, customers are busier, smarter, have shorter attention spans and most importantly have less desire to make products or services work together.

Apple,  Amazon, and EBay are examples that  have taught customers that products, services, data, experiences, and design can all work together to provide a totally seamless experience.

Increasingly, this is what customers are increasingly wanting, and to do that you’ll need to rethink the way you innovate.

In Jeffrey Phillips post “Using ecosystems to build seamless experiences” we raised this present poor understanding within a business, that many lack a good understanding of customer needs.  Actually, it is far worse than we initially felt, still more on that later.

This is a longish read but an important one, to frame our need to think through innovation differently, through a new lens. Take your time, knowing why we need to change is critical. There is a new innovation era that holds promise if we think differently.

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Using ecosystems to build seamless experiences

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source: uxmag.com
visual source: uxmag.com not text

In the first post of this series, Paul Hobcraft framed what we believe is an exceptionally important issue:  innovation doesn’t really work the way we’d like it to.  Far too often, innovation creates incremental, discrete products that don’t seem to drive customer engagement, don’t create disruption in the marketplace and don’t drive a significant amount of revenue or profit.

There are many reasons we could point to – poor understanding of customer needs, risk and uncertainty constraining innovation teams, lack of innovation process and training on the part of the innovation teams, little to no funding, and so on.  These are common challenges that innovation teams face.

However, we believe that many innovation challenges stem not from a lack of internal knowledge or capability, but from misunderstanding the customer and his or her expectations about experiences.  Customers today expect seamless experiences, supported, maintained and enabled by complex ecosystems of products, services, business models, channels, information, and complementary products and services.  Customers aren’t interested or willing to acquire disparate products and services and integrate them. Increasingly customers prefer to acquire seamless experiences, and this expectation will dramatically change how companies innovate.

The problem of narrow focus

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Innovation is simply not working anymore.

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connecting-ecosystem-1We seem to be facing a major crossing-over point in innovation. We can either switch tracks and allow innovation to go on the slower line that continues to stop at all stations, picking up and dropping off, steadily working towards its final goal of “incremental delivery” or, we can decide to keep innovation on the fast track, picking up momentum because we need to treat innovation as ‘core’, essential and needed, to be delivering the growth engine our organizations are requiring today.

Let’s face it, innovation isn’t working successfully for many companies for a variety of reasons.  We are faced today with a changing market. The customer is demanding and their expectations are changing, industry lines are blurring, there are disruptive forces constantly at work 24×7 and even the constant steady drip of new business models are simply not working as well as they should be, so as to gain that elusive growth.

Some speak of VUCA used is an acronym to describe or reflect the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of general conditions and situations we all seem to have become caught up in.

Yet these are all symptoms of a larger problem that innovation is simply not addressing and this is why this growing dissatisfaction on the delivery of innovation solutions is occurring. We are not recognizing the changes occurring but more importantly the opportunities that can be grasped by thinking in different ways. We have many of the solutions right in front of us if we care to look, to understand them and make all the necessary connections and ready ourselves for a change.

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