Nice and Crisp Definition of “Innovation”

Posted on October 7, 2008 
Filed Under Innovation

I was invited to present at a SRI Innovation Forum a few weeks ago. Dr. Curtis Carlson, SRI’s CEO, gave a talk on the disciplines of Innovation (see his book  Innovation: Five Disciplines of Creating What Customers Want )

I really liked his nice and crisp definition of Innovation:

“Innovation is the Creation & Delivery of New Customer Value to the marketplace.”

Add the word “rapid” in front of Creation & Delivery, and I can pretty much use that as the mantra for the Incubator that I’m running…

He then went on and explain the need for a company and all its employees to learn the discipline of Customer Value Creation. They came up with a simple formula for Value Proposition:

NABC = Need, Approach, Benefits per Cost, and Competition

Typically, people come to us (the incubator) with a hot idea and they mostly talk about the Approach. i.e. the formula looks like this ==> nAbc

And most of us Corporate Angels are look for the N & C parts of the formula, thus we focus on NabC. And of course, our customers care about naBc.

Thus, we ended up with what Curtis calls a “Tower of Babels” where everybody talk a different language.

That is so true in what I observe as the mind gap between the Intrapreneurs and the Corporate Angels. The Intrapreneurs get all hot on a solution or a technology, and just don’t get why those idiots running the Incubators just don’t “Get It”. And vice versa.

So, if a company learns the discipline to work thru the NABC formula for all the “hot ideas”, it would go a long long way to closing the mind gap, and getting those ideas toward real business opportunities.

After his presentation, I chatted with Dr. Carlson and he promised to give me some personal coaching on the Innovation Culture program that I’m launching in 2009.  I can’t wait!

Comments

Leave a Reply