After properly repositioning current offerings and prioritizing projects in the development pipeline, a company’s third option for growth is to develop wholly new offerings. Here again, old inefficiencies must be overcome.
While the scattershot brainstorming methods used by most firms today do generate hundreds of ideas, the very quantity of ideas ends up hindering the innovation process. Generating hundreds of ideas does not guarantee success. In reality, companies need just a handful of ideas—but they must be ideas that do a great job addressing important areas of opportunity.
Strategyn's approach to idea generation is unique in that it focuses a company's creative energy on a targeted set of underserved desired outcomes. With this direction—and with the use of our proprietary focused brainstorming tools—companies are able to formulate product and service ideas that are certain to deliver significant customer value.
To evaluate these ideas, we have created the customer scorecard, a tool that enables managers to quantify an idea's value based on its ability to satisfy the collective set of customer desired outcomes. Using the customer scorecard, companies can:
- Compare the quantitative value a product idea delivers with the value that the company's current offerings deliver.
- Compare the quantitative value a product idea delivers with the value that competitive offerings deliver.
- Identify the strengths and weakness of each idea.
- Improve ideas along key dimensions until they provide significantly more value than competing solutions.
- Systematically devise breakthrough ideas and solutions.
Here again, adopting the outcome-driven methodology results in increases in revenue, reductions in development cost, and dramatic improvements in the win/loss ratio—all because companies are able to systematically create products and services that specifically address opportunities in the market.