If there’s a secret sauce to successful product development, it’s human-centered design. To truly create anything with purpose, you must create with the end-user in mind. 

Human-centered design is an exploration of how to accurately and innovatively create a product or service that satisfies consumers’ wants and needs. You must first understand your customer in order to best serve them. The human-centered design process is dedicated to getting to know your target audience then creating products, processes, or experiences that are crafted from their perspective. 

In short, starting and ending with people helps you design products and services that your customers genuinely love. Now that’s good business. 

The following are three key reasons why human-centered design is a smart strategy to implement in your business today. 

3 Benefits of Human-Centered Design

1. Empathy-based

Now more than ever we have been made aware of the vital importance of seeing the world through others’ eyes. Considering other people’s perspectives is what empathy is all about. 

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” -Henry Ford

Empathy is the cornerstone of human-centered design. The best way to serve people is to get to know them. 

One of the most informative ways to gain customer perspective is via user interviews. Essentially, they are structured conversations with your audience about your product, service, or experience that you offer. It’s just like getting to know a new friend or partner better–through conversation, you learn their likes, dislikes, hopes, and needs. This information will help you design more desirable and meaningful experiences for your customers, creating a long-term relationship with them. 

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2. Encourages a learner’s mindset 

Seeing the world through the eyes of your customer also encourages you to approach challenges and innovation with a learner’s mindset. This expanded awareness opens you up to discover new possibilities, challenge biases, and think differently. For example, instead of being stunted by a setback, a learner’s perspective sees the challenge as an opportunity to grow and learn. You roll up your sleeves, sit and listen to the concerns of your target audience, and then tackle the obstacle with a creative solution.

Conversely, a fixed mindset keeps you stuck in one-directional thinking. You see failure as a limitation and throw in the towel, or you develop a product or service that doesn’t meet your customers’ needs at all. A fixed mindset can be judgemental and quick to categorize or place blame which blocks you from creative possibilities and maximum potential. Remember, being in authentic service of others is where we find the greatest success. 

Often our most profound ideas come from thinking outside the box, so allow yourself to. Approaching business with an open mindset allows you to guide your actions through optimism and curiosity; to choose a learner’s mindset is to choose a human-centric design approach to business. 

3. Drives ROI

Operating from human-centric design is indeed a better way to work, but it also directly translates to better business outcomes. A study from Forrester Research found that well established human-centered design has the potential to increase customer conversion rates up to 400%. Human-centered design is not just a competitive advantage, it is an essential asset to business success. 

Human-centered design also saves you time and money; it takes out the guesswork. Engage with your target audience throughout the entire product development process–the beginning, middle, and end–to get feedback on ideas and designs. You will know exactly what your customers like and dislike and make quick, appropriate changes to best serve the end-user. Without being in conversation with your customers, you are creating blindly. This can be a big money suck. 

Use a human-centric approach to pinpoint issues and respond to them before sinking design and development costs into your solution. 

“Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.” –Melinda Gates

Treat your target audience like the important people they are–ideate and create with them in mind to provide them with the best experience possible. Ask your customers what they want and use a human-centric design approach to deliver it.

Do you want to learn more about human-centered design?

Voltage Control facilitates design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post Human-Centered Design–The Secret Sauce to Business Success appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Taylor Dawson started his career as a design engineer at Lexmark and GE. Six months into his first job, he was tasked with designing a new toner cartridge for a Lexmark consumer printer. Throughout numerous experiences designing products for consumers, Taylor began to see a pattern in how product decisions were made. “We have industrial designers who work on projects and think from the consumer standpoint, but if there is ever a skirmish between engineers and industrial designers, in my experience, the industrial designers almost always lose. And they’re only involved at the very first stages of conceptualization.”

Taylor observed that being involved throughout the product lifecycle gave engineers more say in the development of the user experience. “Engineers are touching the first prototypes, running tests and labs, and they’re actually making key decisions that are critical to the user experience with absolutely no understanding of who the customer really is or what their daily use of the product looks like.”

Taylor saw a need to shift how product decisions were being made and he wanted to be a catalyst for that change. “I always wanted to get into a place where I would be able to actually impact how products were developed. Because quite often the first thing that you design, especially in a big company, ends up having an outsized impact on the end product. So we’re delving a lot into design thinking and how we avoid biasing the final solution.”

Challenging the norms of product design eventually led Taylor to become a founding member of FirstBuild, GE Appliance’s open innovation incubator. He shared with me his thoughts on why frameworks don’t suit innovation and how optimization and innovation are uncovered through entirely different processes.

Frameworks are too reductive for innovation

In Taylor’s view, innovation is supposed to be messy. “For some reason, everyone, especially people from a business school mentality or a big corporation mentality, likes to think that there is a neat clean process that you follow that is going to lead you to success.” He sees innovation as more akin to the chaos of life. “I think the reality is that the world is so much messier than that. It’s egotistical to think that you can reduce real life to a set of steps that, if followed, will result in ultimate success. If you try and do that you’ll find that you just continuously hit up against contradictions, and there’s no one simple process to follow.” Instead, Taylor believes in creating an environment of exploration where value can be discovered in the unexpected.

“It’s egotistical to think that you can reduce real life to a set of steps that, if followed, will result in ultimate success.”

Rather than distilling innovation into a process that anyone can do, it’s important to find people with the right mindset and initiative. “In the innovation space you’re trying to start something new, so you can’t reduce it to a series of steps. You need to be willing to learn and do new things that might be very uncomfortable. When we’ve hired people for the business side, I’ve tried to find people who have enough initiative to where, if we’re working on something new, they will just figure out what the next step is as opposed to being told what to do.”

“It’s more about the people than it is about the process.”

When making hiring decisions, Taylor puts less emphasis on degrees or experience that perfectly conforms to the job at hand. He finds a willingness to dive in to be a critical skill when it comes to innovation.“It’s not so important to have the right degree, to have the right set of experiences. It’s more important to have the right mindset and to have the willingness to go and do stuff that is uncomfortable or may seem like it might be beneath your station. When we’ve hired people, we really tried to find people who have the courage and the lack of ego required in order to get things done in that way. It’s more about the people than it is about the process.”

Hiring for innovation

Having a solid approach to hiring is important to the foundation of any innovation program. When possible, Taylor recommends working with a potential candidate as a contractor for a short period of time before hiring. “We make a practice of having an active talent pool of students that we’re circling through. You can find someone who works well with your team with the skill that you need. We’ve been able to have people that we knew well, or that we had worked with for six months or so, that we could bring on the team after we knew what they were capable of doing, that they had the right chemistry, and the right capabilities.”

When time is a concern or you’re trying to scale up quickly, look for people with a history of dealing in uncertainty and examples of a willingness to just figure things out. “I was hiring for a role that is very hard to find a cookie cutter solution for because we didn’t even know what the job was going to be. And two months after this person started, we knew that it was probably going to change a lot. So the person that we selected for it wasn’t selected because of their degree or because of their previous experience. They were selected because we knew that they had the initiative to go and figure out the next step. They were just that kind of person, and we’d seen them do it in a previous job.”

The rules for optimization do not apply

When approaching innovation, Taylor believes it’s important to recognize that the rules for optimization and the rules for innovation are entirely different. He shared one of his favorite observations which comes from Kevin Kelly’s 1997 article “New Rules for the New Economy”:

“Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization; that is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.” — Kevin Kelly

“The reason I like this so much is that it cuts directly against the approach taken to innovation by large companies. You can wrap a process around optimization to achieve predictable yields in performance improvement. You won’t be able to wrap a process around innovation. You actually have to let go of the process and become comfortable with uncertainty.”

While optimization can be useful for a business, it ultimately leads to diminishing returns because processes can only be optimized so much. “For businesses that are currently existing, a 10% growth rate would be an awesome growth rate. They can create a predictable amount of extra value just by optimizing the things that they do well. The gain that you’re going to get through that is going to diminish over time until the point where you reach optimal performance.”

“You actually have to let go of the process and become comfortable with uncertainty.”

Companies that want to dramatically grow their top line have to abandon the processes they use to find optimization because they don’t work for disruptive innovation. “At GE Appliances, they apply the NPI (New Product Introductions) process to a new innovative product. It turns out that it fails dramatically for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is because they look at that as a massive launch and think about how they’re going to invest in it the way that they would invest in one of their major platforms. The projects end up very costly and time-consuming. And they don’t really learn anything about it until the very end.”

As an alternative, Taylor suggests re-tooling your playbook and operating like a startup in order to start getting feedback from paying customers as early as possible. “We’ve styled our playbook along the lines of building a startup. We start small, we’re very open, and we talk to customers very, very early on and all the way through the process. We focus on getting an early version of a product into the hands of real paying customers.”

Taylor likens the process of innovation to panning for gold. It’s a long-term, continuous process in which you find a shiny gold nugget every once in a while. “We like to think that the rules of optimization have their place. Probably 99% of the people in a major corporation are going to use those same rules, the ones they’re comfortable with, to continue the trajectory of the existing company and keep squeezing value out of the existing business model. And then 1% of the people in your company who can be comfortable with uncertainty, who are interested in learning new things and finding new value are going to spend their time panning for gold, looking for the hidden gems that could become the thing that replaces the existing company.”

When it comes to building and funding teams, Taylor finds that a long-term pursuit like innovation benefits greatly from shorter-term goals and investment timeframes. One of his recent ventures involved a team of eight people who, for a time, were struggling with a product that wasn’t bringing in revenue. “Fortunately after about six to eight months of beating our heads against the wall and not being very successful, we found a product that we could offer, that can lead us to being cashflow positive in the coming quarter. But before then, it’s like staring down the barrel of a shotgun.”

Taking away some difficult lessons from that experience, Taylor sees value in building smaller teams with short-term milestones. “The best practice I’ve heard is to fund three to four people full time for three months. Don’t expect they’re going to start something. Expect that their job is discovery. Give them three months to discover if they think there’s something there. If they’ve proved to you that there’s credibly something there, give them three more months to get their first customer. And if they can get their first customer, keep them going. If not, let them move on to the next thing or rotate back into their regular job.”

Innovation Accounting

In order to discern progress in short timeframes, Taylor has adopted Eric Ries’ Innovation Accounting approach to measurement. “The basic idea is that you are looking for lead measures of success that are tied directly to future financial performance. Once you understand which critical attributes yield success, you establish a disciplined rhythm of hypothesizing, testing, and evaluating against a previous benchmark.” The results of the first iteration should then drive subsequent iterations. Taylor doesn’t view this approach as revolutionary per se but does point out that applying learnings to future work in a rigorous way is often a rare practice.

On a recent marketing project, Taylor describes shortening experiments and sprint timeframes to collect more data points. “We launch the sprint on Tuesday morning, running it on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then look at the data on Thursday. By Friday morning we’ve launched another sprint and we start the process again on Monday. We do that for six weeks in a row, so we have about 12 data points. And we’re able to see exactly what’s happened every single time we did it.”

The key to identifying the right metrics is having an idea of what the solution looks like. “For the project, we’re working on now it’s pretty simple, but for the project, we were working on when we first started six or twelve months ago we had no idea. We understood that there was a need in the marketplace, but we didn’t know what the solution looked like. And when you don’t know what the solution looks like yet, you don’t really know how to measure your effectiveness at that solution. That’s a really frustrating problem and it’s a problem that almost all startups go through.”

When structuring innovation programs, Taylor has found that it’s important to acknowledge reality, consider the right team allocation, and ensure your data is truly validated. “Any innovation program that you’re running, if you’re really good, you’re gonna probably have 20% of the things you work on actually get to the next step. Almost everything falls flat.” With this reality in mind, he suggests holding off on adding more people to the team until there’s traction. “It’s rare to find something that performs better than what you’re currently doing. So in that world, you have to make sure that you’re not putting too many resources behind any one thing before you’ve got some traction.”

In order to validate that an idea has traction, get a commitment from actual customers. The three ways customers can show you they’re getting value involve time, money, and social currency. “Time means they’re willing to spend some time talking about it. Social currency means they’re willing to tell their friends about it. Whenever we call something validated, we’re making sure that a customer has actually shown that they value the product. The best form of value that they can give back is, of course, money.”

Make your employees heroes

Once the team is in place and experiments are running, Taylor believes a leader’s role is empowering and mentoring the team and then getting out of their way. “It’s actually based on this idea in a book by Donald Miller called Building a StoryBrand. He says that the hero’s journey can be applied to your company’s brand. You want to turn the customer who buys your product into the hero, and you’re the guide who takes them through the end of their journey and solves their problem.”

Taylor has adapted this concept, replacing the role of the customer with the role of employee. “I think this should apply to the way you think as a manager or boss. You should see yourself as a guide who turns your employees into heroes. If you can put your employees in a position where they can go through a journey that changes them, that actually fundamentally helps them get over a challenge or fear, jump over a hurdle that they’ve always seen in front of them, they will be loyal and hardworking. It will be an enriching experience for them, and they’ll perform for you. That’s the experience that I had with my former boss. And it’s the type of experience that I try and create for the people that I work with now.”

As customer feedback starts coming in, Taylor encourages teams to value data and devalue opinions. “Create a structure and a culture that allows for rapid and low-cost evaluation of new ideas. This can be very uncomfortable as people in the corporate environment are used to conforming to the opinions of leadership, and leaders are used to expressing their opinions.”

During his time launching products for GE Appliances, Taylor found that one of the damaging parts of the process was the requirement to run the idea all the way up to the top. “If there’s a person who is perceived as the smart guy or gal in the room who says ‘that’s a stupid idea,’ the thing gets shot down. What does and doesn’t get launched is subject to the whims of the people who are considered to be the smartest people in the room.”

As proof that hierarchy does not determine one’s ability to predict success, Taylor recalls an experiment. The product was an ice maker with a $500 MSRP that would be crowdfunded for a price of $400 — still four times the cost of a typical ice maker. Guesses were collected on how much the crowdfunding campaign would receive from people all over the company. The answers ranged from $300,000 to $3 million. By the end of the campaign, the funding totaled at $3 million.

“The only way of knowing what product is going to hit is getting it into the market and letting the markets tell you.”

“The person who guessed $3 million was the custodian and the person who guessed $300,000 was the CTO. There was a perfectly indirect correlation between your salary and your ability to guess the market for a product. And it validated exactly what we were trying to do. Because we were trying to prove that people aren’t very good at guessing. No matter how well educated you are, no matter how much experience you have, people aren’t very good at guessing what product is going to hit. The only way of knowing what product is going to hit is getting it into the market and letting the markets tell you.”

A lesson on fear and perception

One of the biggest lessons Taylor has learned in his career is that fear and perception can limit one’s potential. He attributes this lesson to an early experience at FirstBuild. As an engineer who mostly interacted with other engineers, Taylor was eager to get out into the world and talk to people. When the opportunity arose to talk to an online publication he jumped at the chance.

“I spoke to them and I didn’t tell them anything confidential, but the story came out the next day and my boss called me up.” He later learned that GE has a policy that any conversations with the media about GE business had to be pre-approved. In response the head of communications sent out a company-wide email to ensure everyone was aware of the media policy. Taylor initially found this experience to be incredibly embarrassing as those he worked with knew that he was the reason for the email.

Looking back, Taylor sees the experience as one of the best things that happened to him. “It gave me this perspective on what is important and what is unimportant, what the worst case scenario looks like. And it turns out that the only thing that made that a worst case scenario for me was my perception of the event, not the actual outcome of the event. Most people continue to be constrained by things and make decisions based on the fears that they have about what’s going to happen. I’ve been able to, over time, become much more independent from the fears of what’s going to happen by running through the very quick exercise of what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen here? If the worst thing that happens is people might perceive me differently, that’s probably not a really big deal.”

Innovation in the cornhusker state

When I asked Taylor who he thought was getting innovation right, his response came from a place many people wouldn’t consider a hotbed for innovation: Lincoln, Nebraska. He applauds the work of NelNet and their internal incubator as a program worthy of attention.

“They let their employees come up with a pitch and if it sounds like a good idea they’ll give them a very short leash to run on. So, it’s this three-month long discovery exercise. They are not expected to have dollars by the end of it, but they are expected to come back and have learned something significant that proves their hypothesis that there’s really a market. It’s not costly, but it’s really hard for companies to get right because management has a tendency to want to get heavily involved and call the shots.”

Taylor also appreciates P&G’s efforts on launching Tide Spin, an on-demand laundry service. A P&G brand manager, David VanHimbergen, initially pitched the idea to his VP. David asked for six months and two or three people to launch an on-demand laundry service branded with the Tide name. “And I think that within three months they got the business up and running. They rented a warehouse, and within two years they had a comparable company. They recently acquired a local laundry service and they’ve actually doubled or tripled their market with that acquisition.”

Getting comfortable with uncertainty and realizing the importance of people over processes are two ways Taylor believes companies can set themselves up for finding success in unexpected places. Relying on rigorous data collection and application, even teams with limited resources can turn uncertainty into valuable learning opportunities that inform product decisions so they’re more closely aligned with consumer needs.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Valuing Data and Devaluing Opinions in Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

After years of leading innovation teams at companies large and small, Eugene Yamnitsky took on the challenge of establishing an Innovation Center of Excellence at Citrix. Like many of the innovation leaders I have spoken to for this series, Eugene believes there is no silver bullet for successful innovation.

We discussed some of the ways the Citrix innovation program has changed over the years and how those learnings have impacted how his teams approach innovation as well as his views on what it means to fail and succeed.

Embracing Experimentation Instead of Failure

Eugene believes that, rather than having a culture that embraces failure, companies that want to innovate should focus on a culture that encourages experimentation paired with appropriate success criteria. In order for this culture to exist there are four key success factors that can be summed up under two important themes: speed and alignment.

Eugene’s 4 Success Factors for Innovation Programs

1. The team is cross functional (made up of people with varying skillsets).
2. The team is allowed to follow their own process, ignoring the company’s processes for the most part.
3. The team is assigned a mentor — someone who launched successful products in the past, and ideally has failed before as well.
4. The team is given proper executive attention in a form of resources, support, and advice

The idea of running an innovation program like a startup is a recurring theme across innovations programs. Eugene’s take on this concept centers around a need for speed and measurement to ensure companies can adequately invest in promising ideas without over-investing in solutions that don’t meet business goals.

Cross Functional Teams

To brainstorm, iterate on, and validate a potential solution for the least amount of cost possible, teams must have all the skills on board to create a model or prototype on which they can gather customer feedback. Delays introduced by waiting on a designer or developer, for example, result in added cost and less time for validation and implementation.

Team-initiated Processes

Allowing teams to follow their own process is another opportunity to reduce time and cost. Many companies’ processes exist for good reasons — perhaps to ensure quality for customers. However, in the arena of innovation, goals shift and processes must adapt in kind. “Letting the innovation team work the way they believe they can accomplish results fast is the best way to go.”

“Letting the innovation team work the way they believe they can accomplish results fast is the best way to go.”

Enabling quick decision making through validation can necessitate lower quality standards in exchange for faster feedback. Innovation teams afforded the flexibility to follow their own process are empowered with opportunities to find innovative solutions in more time and cost-effective ways.

Executive Support

With flexibility in process comes the added responsibility of demonstrating progress. In the same way a startup must show results in order to secure funding, “[innovation] teams should understand that their progress will be evaluated frequently, and their funding will not continue if they do not show results.”

“Great ideas that are not strategically aligned with a company’s mission and vision won’t get funded in the long run no matter how well the program is structured.”

This lesson came as a result of the inaugural project of the Citrix Incubator. While the successful execution of this project had the promise to be disruptive in the market, the team faced some heavy risks. First, the solution was dependent on Apple making changes to their software to allow developers more access. Second, Citrix is a software company and this project was based on a hardware solution.

“Great ideas that are not strategically aligned with a company’s mission and vision won’t get funded in the long run no matter how well the program is structured,” says Eugene.

Mentorship

For Eugene, the inaugural incubator project highlighted the need for executive sponsorship to ensure innovation efforts coincide with strategic business goals and receive adequate support from the top. Learning from past projects, Eugene mentors teams by helping them focus their energies on solutions that will garner support and avoid past missteps. Now the Citrix Incubator has adapted to conduct innovation projects in 3 month increments followed by funding at 3 month intervals based on results that are evaluated against business goals.

Organizational Support for Innovation

Embracing experimentation should also be accompanied by adaptations to how employees are evaluated. To demonstrate support for innovation programs, the annual review process should incorporate goals for an employee’s participation in innovation programs. Eugene suggests an individual’s review include a goal specifically geared toward deliverables from an innovation project as well as a corresponding goal for their manager that’s tied to supporting the individual’s participation in the project. This provides a clear signal from the company that innovation is supported and aligns the goals of individuals and their managers removing a potential source of conflict.

Measuring Traction

“The definition of traction becomes more robust and changes shape as you go from raw idea, to business concept, to prototype, to an actual solution that you launch.”

When it comes to measuring results, Eugene ascribes to Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics model that focuses on the metrics of acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue (AARRR). Each of these measurements seek to quantify a product’s traction or desirability with potential customers. But how do you measure traction for an idea before it exists as a tangible product? Eugene suggests that the first opportunity for measurement is discussing the idea with multiple potential customers and tracking how many people believe the problem must be solved versus those who just think it would be nice to solve.

As each stage of development progresses, the traction metrics progress toward greater and greater commitment to the proposed solution. In the example above, the next step might be to flesh out a prototype and measure traction by how many people would agree to pay $1 for the product or service.

“The definition of traction becomes more robust and changes shape as you go from raw idea, to business concept, to prototype, to an actual solution that you launch.”

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Customer Discovery

Eugene shared that the main ingredients to getting innovation right revolve around experimentation that is supported by customer discovery — finding your existing or potential customers and talking to them about their needs and pain points. “I think that [innovation] programs are just a part of a solution. Ideally the culture is such that every product development organization is attuned to their customers and continuously innovates by doing customer discovery and experimenting.”

Not only does customer discovery provide valuable, fresh data, it can also help combat teams getting stuck in the realm of incremental innovation (smaller improvements to existing products) by providing them fodder for more disruptive ideas.

Brainstorming with Monopoly

Paired with newfound inspiration from customer discovery, brainstorming activities can help teams think in different ways to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. One activity Eugene has adapted from the Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange Conference is a game that looks a lot like Monopoly.

This approach involves dividing a sheet of paper into squares like a Monopoly game board. In each square a type of technology is listed and the squares are divided between technology the company already uses (ex. online collaboration tools) as well as new technologies to explore (ex. artificial intelligence). The activity creates opportunities for teams to combine new and existing technologies in innovative ways that can then be put through the customer discovery and validation process.

Amazon’s Customer Discovery

Eugene admires Amazon for their agility in generating revenue from their innovation endeavors and for their relentless focus on pleasing their customers by solving their problems through customer discovery. This focus is embedded in Amazon’s culture to the extent that new ideas, rather than being shared through Power Point, are presented in the form of press releases geared toward inducing market or customer excitement even during internal discussions.

Decoupling Success from Specific Outcomes

In addition to being good practice, the process of getting customer feedback and measuring traction can create opportunities for success in unexpected places. Eugene shared a story about a team who, in the process of validating a solution, identified a new problem that surfaced in their customer interviews.

In response, the team built a solution that directly addressed the reported problem by enabling the Citrix sales team to onboard new customers faster. A lack of alignment with business goals, however, forced the team to acknowledge that the product (an onboarding tool) didn’t align with the company mission, and the project was ultimately abandoned in favor of an off-the-shelf solution. But rather than seeing a failed project, Eugene sees a successful execution of customer discovery, identification of a pain point, and validation of a solution that resulted in remedying a problem the company wasn’t even aware of prior to the venture.

Re-evaluating Success and Failure

Taking the time to reflect on past projects like this has shaped how Eugene views failure and success. He believes that, as long the learnings are quick, and decisions were made based on that learning, success has been achieved. By embracing experimentation rather than failure, teams can follow their curiosity without being tied to specific outcomes. “It’s actually a success that we didn’t validate an assumption because now we’re not going to spend time and money on working on something that is not desirable, viable, or feasible.”

A Longer Horizon for Success

Even when the company decides to abandon the project or go in another direction there’s the potential for success. The story Eugene shared of the inaugural incubator project has a surprise ending that perfectly illustrates the value of his four key success factors.

A few years after the project was cancelled the idea found its way back into the Citrix portfolio. This time, however, it had executive sponsorship, strategic alignment, and lessons learned from the first attempt. The end result was a new solution to the same problem, executed in collaboration with a hardware partner, and reliant on Citrix technology without a dependency on Apple’s software.

Executive Buy-in and Sponsorship

While it’s clear executive support is key to success, gaining buy-in for innovation programs can be difficult. Eugene’s advice is to put less emphasis on calling it a big innovation program and instead take the time to understand the strategic goals of the company in order to uncover how innovation team’s can help achieve those goals.

For example, by learning about the strategies of a new executive sponsor and offering to help uncover ways to drive them forward innovation team’s can gain support for future efforts and learn something new in the process. “If we work on something that deliberately aligns with the executive’s vision we may discover something new and unexpected.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Four Success Factors for Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Gary Hoover is an incredibly successful businessman, scholar of business history, and the force behind at least six start-ups (“Maybe eight if you count the ones I started in college,” he says). His successes include the founding of BOOKSTOP, the first chain of giant book superstores, which was later purchased by Barnes & Noble. He also founded Hoover’s, the world’s largest Internet-based provider of information about enterprises, which went public and was eventually purchased for $117 million. Today, Gary Hoover mentors entrepreneurs, speaks to corporate and government leaders around the world, and writes on business history, retail, and other subjects on his website Hoovers World. (I definitely recommend checking out his site.)

We had a fascinating conversation over the phone, with Gary talking to me from his home in Flatonia, Texas where he has a personal library of over 57,000 books. We spoke about his successes and his thoughts on the secret ingredients for innovation. And, he shared a ton of great examples and stories with me from the history of business. While it’s hard to choose just a few nuggets from our chat, here are some my favorites…

Innovation Can Be ‘Tiny’

One thing I enjoyed about Gary’s perspective is that his definition of innovation is not narrow. When he talks innovation, he’s not only thinking about the things that might jump to mind when we hear that word — things like apps or digital technology. He takes a broader view, naming everything from the factory farming of chickens, the airline’s “hub and spoke” model, and FedEx’s modern delivery system as some of the major, impactful innovations in recent history. “In my mind, all of those are technologies, they are new innovative techniques, a new way of delivering or making a new technology or service,” he said.

He also talked about the usually-unnoticed ways that companies innovate on a daily basis: “It’s equally important that companies innovate in small ways. I’m willing to bet that UPS and FedEx are both looking at ways to improve themselves every day and ways to tweak the system.”

“I think innovation can be tiny things or big things.” — Gary Hoover

Obsess About Your Customers

Just as Gary takes a different view on what constitutes innovation, he also believes that innovation is not simply about who has the better technology or science. He cited Apple, which he calls one of the two greatest technology companies in American history. (IBM is the second company.) He talked about Apple’s famed CEO Steve Jobs and his relentless focus on his customers: “Did he really have better science than Dell or HP or Microsoft? I’m sure he had great science, but he had this obsession with design and with the user experience. So even in the great technology companies, it’s not really about the technology. It is about knowing and loving your customer.”

The customer is always top of mind for Gary: “Coming out of retail, I have this obsession with: Who is my customer? What do they want and what can I do for them today?” It was the customer that was at the heart of his third start-up, Travelfest, which was a travel superstore that he started in the mid-90s. “The travel agency industry was kind of a racket with the airlines giving the travel agency bonuses if they booked customers on their airline. Travelfest had nothing to do with that. We booked based on what was best for the customer, not just the big carriers…We played by a whole different set of rules. We put the customer first which was rare.” While the stores ultimately closed, the story really illustrates how Gary thinks and the primacy of the customer in all he does.

“Coming out of retail, I have this obsession with: Who is my customer? What do they want and what can I do for them today?” -Gary Hoover

Look for the Oddballs

I asked Gary to tell me about his essential ingredients for success in business. He talked a lot about the importance of having a different perspective, of thinking about things differently. He told me a story about Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart: “When he opened a new store, he always put one person on the management team who made other people uncomfortable, who just wasn’t like anyone else. He always tried to find somebody who just thought differently.”

“Get different minds in the room. At least hear them out. Look for the oddballs.” — Gary Hoover

For Gary, the concept of thinking differently is closely related to having the mental space to let your mind wander and come up with new ideas. He links his tendency to daydream to his creativity: “When I was in school, I did a lot of daydreaming. I spent a lot of my life doodling. I still go driving the back country roads and let the mind flow and turn the music up.” (It’s also why he infrequently uses a telephone. “The ringing annoys me and breaks my train of thought,” he says.)

He also talked about how some companies have encouraged this kind of free thought and how it can be directly tied to innovation: “3M would give their people one day a week off to go study whatever they wanted to and look into other things. Through that, and processes like that, they came up with Post-It notes and all kinds of other innovations.”

Mash Up Two Great Ideas

When asked Gary about his innovation “silver bullet”, he said: “I think the most important thing is combining two things that everybody sees every day.” This comes from his experience with creating BOOKSTOP: “I had this idea of a book superstore. The idea of the superstore was created by Charles Lazarus with Toys “R” Us in the late 1950s. By the time I did BOOKSTOP, everybody had been to a Toys “R” Us and everybody had been to a book store, but no one thought to put the ideas together.”

“By the time I did BOOKSTOP, everybody had been to a Toys “R” Us and everybody had been to a book store, but no one thought to put the ideas together.” — Gary Hoover

Gary continues to use this method of combining two seemingly disparate ideas as a way to play around with new and novel business concepts: “Sometimes I make a grid with ten columns and rows and throw [stuff] on each side — books, music, flowers, movies and, on the other side, ways to distribute it: brick and mortar , online selling, memberships, subscriptions, library loaning… Then I look at each box in that grid. Is there an opportunity there? Is there something that someone isn’t doing? With any new idea you have to give it a chance. You can’t take five seconds and say it will never work. Let it sink in, play with it, let it marinate, talk to people about it.” (I don’t know about you, but I love this 10 x 10 grid idea and can’t wait to try it.)

Follow Your Gut & Be Brave

Finally, I want to end with some wise words from Gary on what we need more of in American business and innovation right now: “What I think is lacking in big corporations today in America is imagination and courage.” He used Dollar Shave Club as an example of bravery, as they took on a giant like Gillette, which had owned the industry for a century. Another company he admires is CVS, especially for their move to stop selling cigarettes: “That cost real money as that is a lucrative field. But they didn’t really see it right being a health oriented store to do that. They just had the guts…”

“What I think is lacking in big corporations today in America is imagination and courage.” — Gary Hoover

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