Four Steps to Sustainable Growth

When it comes to sustaining growth, you need to find your company’s next S-Curve. And to do this in a way that’s predictable, you need an ongoing innovation process. After a thorough study of the best practices of innovative organizations and the advice of many innovation experts, I’ve found a way to simplify this continuous process, focusing on the four essential components which together will serve as your innovation power tools.

1. Learn – The first step in any innovation process is to uncover the unaddressed needs of your customers. You need to stand in their shoes to understand their business environment, and to learn what annoys them and what delights them, their aspirations, and what keeps them up at night. Learning from your customers requires listening to them and observing how they operate. The goal is to uncover an opportunity to solve a new problem for your customers – before someone else does.
2. Design – The customer problem identified in the first step becomes a design challenge that drives the creation of new solutions. In most cases, there are no existing solutions other than the customer’s own approach. This creates a greenfield opportunity – a new uncontested market. As with any greenfield opportunity, however, there is a lack of structure and an almost unlimited set of options. Therefore, this kind of problem solving requires a process that is different from traditional business planning. As a result, the most innovative new product teams are borrowing from the toolkits of designers and architects by using design thinking to explore a wider range of creative options.
3. Test – Once your team has designed a new solution, it needs to test its concept with prospective customers: Does it solve the problem it is intended to? Is it easy to use? Is something missing? Will the customer find the budget to pay for it? Too many companies bypass this step, but it’s better to get these questions answered before a company invests a significant amount of money in product development and launch. This testing phase enables you to glean valuable insight from customers and serve to prevent your company from discovering product design flaws the hard way.
4. Model – Once customers have validated a new concept, your company can focus on developing a more scalable commercial version. The company also needs to decide on key elements of the business or delivery model, including pricing, positioning, partnerships, and customer acquisition and retention. One can’t assume that the business model for existing products and services will necessarily work for the new solution. New business model designs can be as disruptive and forward-thinking as the new solution itself.

Lastly, remember that innovation can never be a fire drill. And the launch of your company’s new product or service is not the finish line, but as the start of a journey of learning from customers and improving the new offer over time. It’s just the beginning of another S-Curve!

For more insights like these, check out my new book, The Curve Ahead, which was featured in the July edition of the Business and Leadership section of Amazon’s “Best Books of the Month.” Copies are now available through Amazon and iTunes. An audiobook version will be available in the coming weeks.