Innovation on Steroids

How do you drive an organization forward to achieve the most rapid innovation possible?

Based on my twenty plus years in both corporate (enterprise) and also supporting very early stage software companies, it strikes me the realities are still the same.

1.) Having a very clearly defined product or service vision of what you are trying to achieve, and an understanding of why the market should purchase this experience from you needs to be very acute and differentiated?

2.) Developing an employee engagement culture that ensures talent is motivated by your vision, mission and can believe the results you are striving to achieve are real and they can align their minds and hearts to focus on realizing the dream or customer promise you are aspiring to fulfil.

3.) Creating a customer experience that is uniquely differentiated to other experiences in the market. Each customer touch point makes a difference along the value memory highway. How you condition an organization to think and behave can be explicitely programmed into your organizational culture DNA, but also must be embedded into your business processes and measurement systems.

All these points add up, but there is nothing more critical than ensuring that you can successfully commercialize your products and services and secure consistent customer footprints, and create a brand that creates a following.

We are now at the same that employee engagement and customer engagement are constant heart beats in developing innovation capacity.However to drive innovation on steroids we need to add to this current formula fix a focus on community experiences.

What needs to be added to the mix?

As more and more trust moves to web based experiences where consumers rely on purchasing guidance or advice from trusted networks, the only growth engine remaining for innovation capacity is really community influence and mining for community intelligence to propel growth more rapidly forward.

When one looks at the success of companies like Zappos (shoe retailer sold to eBay for $850 million after attempts from eBay and others failed), or other companies like eBay or Facebook which are aggregating communities around deep product niches demonstrate new approaches to developing corporate business models.

Pathways for Innovation Execution Excellence

If you are looking to develop a deep digital social media strategy around your product or service offering, we have two new offers at my firm that may interest you:

1.) Digital Social Media Market Differentiation Rapid Scan - we quickly look at your digital social media offerings, scan the market, and give you clear recommendations of ways to differentiate and improve your go to market capabilities.

2.) Pilot Innovation Community Bazaars - we have learned that developing a rapid pilot with an existing community to test your product or service is a very effective way to gain rapid customer insights. There is a community these days for almost everything so stepping back and going directly to an existing community vs creating a new community is a far smarter way to innovate and be more agile.