Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, guys. Jeff Standridge here. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. How are we doing?
Jeff Amerine:
Great. Glad to be back. Ready to talk about some more innovation. How about you?
Jeff Standridge:
I am. Tell us about it.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, you know, we think about innovation. We think about how we typically engage with clients. One of the very first things is that there’s varying levels of maturity and understanding of innovation in most organizations, even sophisticated large organizations. So we try to go in initially with some fundamentals training. We’ll go through how you do idea harvesting, how do you think about ideation? What are some of the definitions of innovation? We get them kind of set on that. We’ll talk about your lean canvas process. This is a way to size up an idea and a business model. This is what we think about design thinking. We’ll couple that with aspects of customer discovery. How to ask really good open ended questions once we get them with the sort of fundamental understanding of good sort of spiral oriented, iterative oriented innovation processes will then move to something where they can make tangible progress towards innovation. And that’s what we typically call the challenge phase. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the challenge phase?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. So with with the challenge phase, you know, one of the problems we run into all the time really goes back to one of the primary reasons that new startup entrepreneurs fail is that they create a product that no one wants or as we say, that not enough people will buy at the price point required for it to be a profitable, ongoing concern. And the reason they do that is because they didn’t spend any time really validating the problem that they think they were solving. They came up with an idea and they fell in love with that idea. And so a large part of our innovation engagements revolve around what we call the challenge sprint. So that’s gathering a group of people from an organization together. And we can either, we can either give them broad categories of challenges that that may be identified by the executive team, or we can do more of an open innovation approach and just say, you know, what are the biggest things that are, you know, that would be a game changer for the organization or what things are stopping you from being a game changer. What one problem, challenge, or result, if you solved it or seized it, would be a game changer. We have a number of ways to get at that. But we ask these folks to step away from their biases, to put aside temporarily their aspirations and their inspirations because they come to the table with insights, inspirations and aspirations to change whatever it is they want to change. And we say, step away from that and let’s step back and ask the question, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What’s the challenge we’re trying to overcome? What’s the opportunity we’re trying to seize? What’s the result we’re trying to create? And many times we have folks who don’t really they can’t really get there. They don’t really understand that what they’re really doing is just rephrasing their idea and masquerading it as a problem statement or as a problem. And so we get pretty pedantic, I guess I would say it, making them say my problem is this. And, you know, one of the things I found useful in doing that is to basically ask the question, okay, so what you say that is a problem. So what? Or to have them identify. Well, if you say this is a problem, what are you seeing? What are the key themes or the key issues that you’re seeing, observing on a day to day basis that lead you to believe that’s a problem? So that’s the very first thing we do in that challenge. Sprint is to get them to be very, very specific, very articulate, articulate about identifying one problem, one and only problem and not intimating their idea masquerading inside that problem.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, as many times as we ask that question and it’s human nature, the very first thing they come up with is they say we need this kind of solution. And you say, No, hold on, hold on. We’re talking about what’s the problem or the unmet need. So it’s almost like being the host of Jeopardy, right? You’ve got to ask the question. We have to constantly drag them back through that to get that people comfortable with it, because it’s counterintuitive, really.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. And then when they come back with it, they just rephrase it such that their solution is rephrased as a problem saying. So I heard one time where their initial problem statement was “We need a new community center for youth to have a place to hang out”. And I said, No, that’s really not a problem statement. That’s the solution. And they said, “Oh, okay, I see”. Now rephrase that as a problem statement. They say, well, the problem is there are not enough community centers for our youth to hang out. Okay. All right. So then it was like, all right, so, so what? So what? Let’s back up and let’s identify the key issues that you’re seeing that leads you to your bias, that there’s not enough community centers? Well, we have youth who are getting in, more youth that are getting in trouble with police officers. We have so and so. So they start naming these issues and we start saying, okay, now you’re starting to identify the potential challenges that may be part of that problem statement.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, so it’s a process and part of it, you know, we have to be sort of forensic facilitators in a way that’s asking the question why and say it again is stated in the form of a problem and then eventually people get it and when they do, a light bulb comes on and that same time we’re saying, listen, don’t fall in love with the solution that you’re already thinking about. Fall in love with the process, be true to the process, and it will take you to a better place than what you would have ended up with if you put all your energy into something you already had in mind without doing any work on it.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. And once we get them to identify the problem and they get to an appropriate or seemingly appropriate problem statement, then it’s okay, let’s quantify that problem. So talk a little bit about that.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s super important. So a lot of times they’ll make the initial assertion on a problem and it will sound a lot like an opinion because there’s not any data behind it. So that’s where we get to the next round of discussions. It’s like, well, what’s the real, what’s the economic impact? You know, give us the background on why is this a big problem? How is this going to impact or how does this impact the cost or revenues or how is this impacting your target audience? So give us the data and that’s what we try to push them to go from an assertion with a lot of adjectives to something that’s got some facts that support why there’s an economic impact that’s measurable. Something’s right.
Jeff Standridge:
How do we know it’s a problem? What credible facts or statistics that you have that say it’s a problem and what credible facts or statistics do you have that suggest how big that problem is, either in financial terms, people impact terms or what have you? And then we move to the part that I know is one of your favorite parts. So talk us through the next to the next part of that process.
Jeff Amerine:
So at this point, once, once you’ve gone through it, you’ve got a good problem statement. And if you think about it, if you were to visualize the lean canvas, that’s the very left hand side, then you need to spend some time thinking about what are the customer segments very specifically that have it, or if it’s an internal innovation, who are the stakeholders and be real specific. It’s not industry categories. It needs to be kind of by name in a way, or by job title. And so you define these customer segments. This is, you’re starting on kind of the top half million canvas. Then you’ll go into a little more depth around what are the elements of the solution in terms of the benefits. Think about what are the benefits that you hope that the solution will deliver and they should match kind of directly with the problem description that you’ve given. And somewhere in that mix you’ll also think about what’s the value proposition, what’s that unique value proposition that will be the memorable statement as we think about Walmart, which is a very long term innovative company, their unique value proposition is save money and live better through everyday low pricing delivered by the world’s most efficient supply chain. Now everybody only remembers save money and live better, but nobody forgets that. So that’s the kind of thing we focus them on. Those are the first four boxes they work on and to know if they’re on the right track, that’s when we begin to engage the customer discovery process where they’re going out. And it’s a lot of trench warfare, so to speak, in that face to face meetings, video chat meetings and phone calls. They’re not just delivering a survey at this point. They’re really asking good, open ended questions that start with words like why, how, how much, what? Those kinds of things rather than giving the choices you hope they answer, you listen. It’s just a tool for being able to ask good questions and listen to the customer, articulate the problems that they feel in their own words. And you don’t say anything about the solution you have in mind at that point. It’s really to try to find out if your assertions or beliefs about the problem are validated by your potential customers and stakeholders.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, And if you talk to 15 or 20 potential customers and not a single one of them says anything remotely close to the two or three problems that you’ve identified, maybe your idea or maybe you’re the problem that you’re solving is, is not experienced by your potential stakeholders to the degree that your bias says that it is.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s exactly right. And either you’ve got the wrong problem that you’re thinking about or the wrong customers. But in all cases, that’s where you kind of redirect and say, maybe we’re looking at the wrong customer, the wrong stakeholder segment, or we’re really thinking about something that’s not really a problem. Ideally, when you think about an innovation program, you don’t want to spend a lot of time focusing on nice-to-have things, you want to focus on things where there’s a ton of pain that are must-have things that can make sort of dramatic improvements. And that’s this process of customer discovery will help you get some better understanding about where you are in that spectrum of nice to have innovation versus a must have.
Jeff Standridge:
And I go back to one of the very first episodes that we did with the Chief Science Officer at Phigenix a few years ago, a couple of years ago, where he said that, you know, he has 30 some odd patents. And we asked him the question, you know what do you decide what how do you decide what to work on? And he said, you know, I go after big business problems, big problems, big challenges that affect a whole lot of people that other people have tried to solve but haven’t quite cracked the nut for which I think we can provide a reasonable solution. And that creates a tailwind that makes market adoption so much easier.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And sometimes and in fact, Jennings is a good example. You have to kind of pioneer the creation of a new approach to an industry. What they do is corporate water quality, indoor air quality, and they had to be out front. Part of their innovation was they drove the standard that ultimately would be adopted by the government that everyone then had to follow, and they knew that industry would head that direction. But part of the innovation of the initial patents was to help drive the regulatory process to recognize, hey, people dying of Legionnaires disease is a big deal. And sometimes that occurs because we’re not doing a good job coordinating or or managing the chlorination process in these internal water and HVAC systems. So it’s, you know, Bill McCoy, Dr. Bill McCoy’s, he’s really an innovative guy and he does a fantastic job driving that for Virginia as well.
Jeff Standridge:
Just to bring this home. We’re talking about the challenge phase of an overall innovation process where we appropriately identify the problem or the opportunity in very clear and specific terms. We gather credible facts and statistics to validate quantitatively that the problem exists and the magnitude or the size of the problem. We identify our target stakeholders. If it’s an internal process or innovation or target customers, if it’s something commercial. And we then begin to do some open-ended questioning some customer discovery with those target stakeholders. And at every stage we’re preparing ourselves to pivot our thinking based upon the data that we are, that we are bringing on from that credible facts and statistics stage and or that customer stakeholder till we get to the point where we’ve got a quantified, qualified problem that now we’re ready to move into the design phase. And in our next episode we’re going to be talking about the design phase of innovation. And I would tell you that if you want a copy of the Innovation Leadership blueprint, go to www.innovationjunkie.com and send us a note on the Contact Us page and we’ll be glad to drop you a PDF of that Innovation Leadership blueprint. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We’ll see you soon.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
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