Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2005, 202 pages
ISBN: 978-0-07-140867-7
Keywords: Business Development
For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm — that is, using customer "requirements" to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, failure rates are still high and breakthrough innovations are still rare.
In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.
With information based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unsuitable and woefully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as "needs", "benefits", "specifications", and "solutions", Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal "voice of the customer" and focus on the jobs customers need to get doen and aggressively uncover the measurable outcomes customers hope to achieve.
With the same insight, simplicity, and incommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details en eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of tyhe innovation process — from segmenting martkets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to:
Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark books arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates — and create the prodicts and services customers really want.