What are the most effective ways to overcome roadblocks to product innovation?

Too often, innovation or new product development forgets about the customer. When your customer is brought into the innovation development cycle early and maintained there with 2-way feedback throughout the innovation and commercialization cycle--- sales will expand & the development noise disappears as your focus is on the customer and not yourself.

Flexible conviction is a key quality for innovators. Conviction because you need to be convinced regarding what you are trying to achieve, where you are trying to go. Real innovations are the ones which are inventing new ways of doing things, disrupting behaviors, creating services/objects/experiences never seen before and, as such, not easy to test. A dose of stubbornness is critical. BUT: with some flexibility to be able to avoid the dead ends, the real signals of failure.

1.) Speak to customers / Identify your target customer and their underserved need You can't find product <> customer fit if you're not sure of what your customer's underserved need is. To overcome this, you need to have access to customers so you can do discovery iterate at scale, 2.) If you already have access to customers and have validated their underserved needs, testing the value proposition becomes essential If you need to deliver over 5-10X value through your proposition, will it still overcome the friction created by change? In @Steve Baxter's words, Ideally, you'd solve a bleeding neck problem rather than a broken toe problem. 3.) but this will only matter if your product is aligned with your business objectives.

When generating ideas to test, there are three basics things that can make the process more effective: * identify the key hypothesis you want to validate, * plan the quickest tests you can conduct to validate those hypothesis, * collect evidences to de-risk you idea which will maximize the probability of impact.

Innovation Odyssey: One time at work, I embarked on an innovation odyssey by generating and testing multiple ideas to conquer the challenges hindering product evolution. Creative Voyage: In my experience, navigating through ideation techniques, prototyping, and user testing unveiled a creative voyage that not only explored diverse possibilities but also validated assumptions crucial for progress. Navigational Wisdom: One thing I've found helpful is embracing frameworks like design thinking, lean startup, and agile methodology, acting as navigational wisdom in the journey of being both creative and customer-centric.

Generating and testing ideas is perhaps the boldest part of innovating a product or service. Everything must be approached with cleverness, a practical mindset, and a touch of audacity. When this is done well, success is guaranteed.

The culture you create around communicating about the roadblock is really important. I have found its really important to signal that you are open to discussing the real issues by bringing some up yourself. Otherwise you may get into a cycle of endless meetings without addressing the elephant in the room.

Let’s be honest - path to creating something unique and innovative is a path less travelled hence bound to have its challenges and roadblocks. It takes a village so collaboration is key, but also the culture for communication is important. Failing to communicate or bring up risks in time for the fear of failure makes it difficult to move forward. Teams should feel safe and encouraged to share, problem solve and remove roadblocks. Ignoring problem never makes it go away, but addressing it collectively and as an opportunity may actually lead to uncharted avenues.

I fear that we overuse these terms, and we wave our hands at them. I don't find that adding more tools, meetings and feedback mechanism help in communicating. Personally, I find that socializing is most effective. Simply talk to the team and the stakeholders. You'll be amazed at what happens.

This is an exciting part of the innovation process where innovators find out more about the real solution / proposition and the revenue model. Forming hypotheses, designing experiments with clear KPIs, and iterating with the proposition and the revenue model early on is key to “de-risk” before scaling with conviction and appropriate investments.

It is also important to remember that we tend to learn from failures but not from success. When things going south we try to quickly figure out how to dig ourself out of the hole but when everything sails smoothly, we meet the risk of being too comfort in success. Always ask yourself why things go wrong or right, document it.

To overcome challenges to product innovation like resource constraints and customer resistance, the 'fail fast' approach can be adopted. If we consider the 'cost of design changes' graph (commonly used in development and user experience), it stacks up the no. of possible design alternatives against the cost of change across the different product development stages. By learning (of failure) early, at the requirements or concept design review stage for example, product changes can be implemented more quickly and cheaply. But once it gains more body (at development or deployment), the resource strain to learn and adapt from failure can be huge. The 'fail fast' approach is a simple, effective way to innovate and remain flexible throughout.

In addition to seeking external support from customers and partners, don't forget to also look for cross-industry insights. Looking outside one's industry can bring disruptive ideas and approaches that could be adapted to different contexts. #Innovation #CrossIndustryCollaboration #DisruptiveIdeas

In today's environment, there's no room for the old-fashioned philosophy of "not invented here", and that applies to all team functions, not just engineering. There are experts "out there" that have more and/or better resources to assist us in accomplishing our goals ... use them!

I don't agree that this is the fifth step, well not entirely. Dialogue with customers & partners is the first step, the last step and many steps in between as product innovation is a continuous loop.

From a different perspective, it's essential to link celebrations and rewards directly to the innovation process's intrinsic value. Instead of solely focusing on external recognition, fostering an environment where the joy of solving challenges and contributing to meaningful projects becomes a self-rewarding aspect. This cultivates a sense of purpose, aligning personal fulfillment with professional accomplishments in the innovation journey.

Celebrate by "Pruning" ideas, concepts, options and printing/posting the resulting diagram/list for others to see and appreciate as art - the art of quality thinking. Real success comes not from an endless deluge of content production (resist the the education system's trauma from grading you on volume of output). Real success comes from eliminating all that is unnecessary risk, excess waste, irrelevant options so the company can focus on what matters and direct all their effort towards winning. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

It is imperative that we shift our perspective on celebration. Rather than reserving it solely for the pinnacle of success, we must learn to celebrate at every stage of our journey. This shift in mindset, from celebrating on success to celebrating to succeed, marks a crucial paradigm shift. In essence, we learn that celebration is not a destination but a continuous journey. It's a journey that entails recognizing and honoring the relentless pursuit of excellence, no matter how incremental it may seem. Create an environment where success is not an endpoint but a constant state of being, fueled by admiration, acknowledgment, and the joy of the journey itself.

In my 12+ years in the industry, I've witnessed common innovation challenges: 1. Leaders dissatisfied with innovation impact. 2. CIOs overwhelmed by tech choices. 3. Innovation teams sidelined by core units. 4. CFOs undervaluing digital investments. Root causes: 1. Disconnection from core business. 2. Tech-centric focus. 3. Analysis paralysis. 4. Narrow success metrics. 5. Overemphasizing tech risk. Remember, innovation is a journey, needing a map (Innovation Pathfinder), an explorer mindset (Adaptive Leadership), and a culture that supports it.

A few years my job was to build an ML model to clean over 10 million customer addresses for a large company. Given the stakeholders were not quite tech-literate they found it hard to understand the value they will be getting from an ML model to do the job and kept pushing to just hire an army of humans to do the job. Their argument was the ML model is a black box and takes forever to become perfect and we could hire a lot of people to get the job done. Well, that's right but only for once, as their business grows they will still be faced with the same issue. So the lesson is to make things easy to understand with the use of visuals/diagrams and show financial benefits tagged to it. As I did that, we had the green light to deploy ML model.

I believe the primary blockers to product innovation are related to the space allocated for innovation within organizations. If there's a dedicated innovation department, it often leads to a redundant and overly systemic view of the market and company positioning. Consequently, a team that constantly faces frustration as their ideas may not align with short-term shareholder returns. The 'Three Boxes Solution,' by Vijay Govindarajan, offers an interesting approach. It helps companies understand their origins, the fundamental practices they shouldn't abandon, and the future they should strive for. By not only dedicating efforts but also investments aligned with this framework, organizations can clarify and easily eliminate these blockers.