Anthony Ulwick quotes: innovation consulting guru and the author of What Customers Want, Tony W. Ulwick knows a thing or two about making clients happy. Here are his best quotes.
“For a company to innovate, it must create products and services that let consumers perform a job faster, better, more conveniently, and/or less expensively than before. To achieve this objective, companies must know what outcomes customers are trying to achieve (what metrics they use to determine how well a job is getting done) and figure out which technologies, products, and features will best satisfy the important outcomes that are currently under-served.”
“Probably the most difficult challenge in getting customer inputs is determining in advance which of the three types of customer data (jobs, outcomes, or constraints) to try to capture in a given situation.”
“Development and marketing managers are responsible for identifying opportunities for growth, segmenting markets, conducting competitive analysis, generating and evaluating ideas, generating intellectual property, communicating value to customers, and measuring customer satisfaction.”
“The customer-driven movement has failed to produce the desired results because asking the customer what he wants solicits not only the wrong inputs, but inputs that inadvertently cause the failures that managers are fervently trying to avoid.”
“Nearly everyone in a major corporation has participated in a brainstorming session in which, without knowing the customer’s needs, they were encouraged to generate hundreds of ideas and were told that there is no such thing as a bad idea. You can probably still picture walls of Post-It notes.”
“An agreed-on language is fundamental to success in any discipline, yet confusion has permeated product development because companies continue to define ‘requirements’ as any kind of customer input: customer wants, needs, benefits, solutions, ideas, desires, demands, specifications, and so on. But really, those are all different types of inputs, none of which can be used predictably to ensure success.”
“A new market innovation occurs when a company discovers that people (individuals or businesses) are struggling to get a job done on their own because no products exist and devises a creative product or service that enables customers to get that job done faster and cheaper than ever before; ultimately, the company creates a new market.”
“Operational innovation happens when a company discovers inefficiencies in a business operation and works to address those inefficiencies through creative solutions.”
“Product innovation, or service innovation, which is the most common type of innovation, results from improvements that are made to existing products and services.”
“Disruptive innovation, as made popular by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen, results when a company uses a new technology to disrupt the prevailing business model in an existing market that is filled with over-served customers. This approach to innovation is different.”
“Only after knowing what jobs customers are trying to get done and what outcomes they are trying to achieve are companies able to systematically and predictably identify opportunities and create products and services that deliver significant new value. Only then can they figure out what customers want.”
“Technically speaking, innovation is the process of creating a product or service solution that delivers significant new customer value.”
A little technical, but these’ll get you thinking about seven figure innovation nonetheless.
Remember, it’s important to study these millionaire quotes daily.
