Management Consulting and Training - International Management Technologies, Inc.
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Courses > INNOVATION VS. STUFF THAT SUCKS: The Roadmap to WOW!
-- Course Outline --
Does the evidence support the claim that a better mousetrap will cause the world to beat a path to your door? The short answer is no. The leader for 100 years has remained dominant; despite the fact mousetraps are the most invented American product of all time. Consider all the effort wasted by innovative would-be leaders. This session is for change leaders interested in achieving by design innovative excellence customers will rave about.
Rising expectations, new technologies and seismic changes in the economic, environmental and social world offer significant rewards to customer-centered innovators. Unfortunately, successful innovation can be very hard to achieve because the enterprise and would-be innovators have the tendency to:
- Pursue technology as “the solution”, only to experience customer rejection
- Impose artificial constraints on what is possible
- Make something better when it shouldn’t be done at all (such as the better mousetrap)
- Base new product/service development on flawed, outdated or unchallenged assumptions
- Treat innovation as an exception to the rule
- Drive speed to market at the expense of completeness and ease of use
- Define competitive advantage by current competitors or past customer behavior
This interactive, highly practical session gives you a clear path, tools and a framework to strengthen your innovation pursuits. You will see how to apply innovation to the service and knowledge work the vast majority of us do. You will leave this fast paced and content rich session with many takeaways, including:
- The 7 Principles for successful innovations that meet the WOW! test
- Tools to anticipate (and test) what customers want
- The key concept that makes innovation for service as easy as for widgets
- The #1 attribute every successful innovation has
- What drives customers to say, “That sucks!”
- The Innovation Roadmap to customer love and competitor envy
- How to encourage divergent thinking of outcomes versus just convergent thinking about processes and product features
It is possible to achieve purposeful innovation that meets the “WOW” test. Think iTunes and its dominance in recorded music. You’ll see some of the previously unexplained reasons for Apple’s success, relevant to what you can begin to apply tomorrow. This session is about winners, losers and the practical principles you can use for your own success.
Much has been written about how to make improvements in processes and products. The bias many improvement practitioners start with is some known failure or disappointment. The identification of the cause(s) naturally leads to a better, more consistent result. Many methods (root cause analysis) and tools support this approach. There is nothing wrong with it. But the convergent thinking enabling successful improvement is not sufficient to achieve successful innovation. For that, we need divergent thinking which is not constrained by our preconceived ideas of what is possible.
Attend this humorous, interactive and high energy session and expect to be simultaneously challenged and entertained while you discover answers to the following questions:
- How do you design for WOW, as experienced by customers? These are the innovations we are most familiar with and we wish were ours.
- What easy-to-execute method always uncovers the mind of the customer, even when they couldn’t otherwise tell you? We may hear exactly what they said but still be clueless about what was in their mind. Customers often give us answers to just what we’ve asked, even when they are the wrong questions.
- How do you apply innovation to intangible service and knowledge work?
- How do you encourage divergent thinking focused on outcome excellence versus convergent thinking about process and product improvement? Technically superior innovation is often something only another producer would love.
INTENDED AUDIENCE
Leaders of strategic initiatives or projects intended to make demonstrable improvement such as (a) the rate of business growth, (b) the ability to anticipate and deliver on customer priorities, (c) differentiation in service and products, (d) simplicity experienced by all those we seek to satisfy, (e) customers saying “WOW”.
PARTICIPANT COMMENTS
“I want to be sure you heard from me what a critical piece of work we all did during your session last week. We are already beginning to incorporate the thinking in your model into our efforts in the Mental Health Service. Thanks so much for a superlative seminar.” Rich Goepfert, East Region Chief, Mental Health Services Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound
“This created excitement about ‘what’s possible’ and gave the leadership a new way to evaluate the work they and the organization do.” John Powers, Director, Eastman Kodak
“I can assure you I will think, act, work and do things differently as a result of this workshop! Your ‘real life examples’ were excellent. Rob's enthusiasm is very contagious. I actually got energized by his energy!!” I found Rob's personal examples striking both intellectually as well as psychologically. Thanks!” University of St. Thomas
“Excellent program! This ... challenged me to make a mind shift to apply the customer-centered thinking in my work. The emphasis on creative, divergent thinking may be the key to our success in the next ten years.” AVP, American Honda
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