Be Less Zombie

4The Innovation that Customers Buy

Creating a laser focus on the innovation that matters most.

Creating a cause-and-effect relationship between revenues and innovation is a powerful galvanising force.

But there is a lesser-known relationship that has equal potency. It de-risks innovation, creates a focus on what matters most, and reveals the most profitable areas of creative pursuit.

It is the specific amount of progress that customers make in their lives because of you.

What does that mean? I'll be covering this in much more detail in Part Two: Turning on a Fast-Track Innovation Process. But for now, think about these questions:

• Given the current speed of change, in five years' time, why will today's customers still actively choose your products and services, rather than switch to a competitor's?
• On what basis? In which specific dimensions?

Five years?! Who can predict customer churn, retention and growth levels across that time frame?

‘We're doing well, but our whole company could unwind within three years,’ a senior executive of a 30,000-employee company once told me. This was a hot, born-digital brand, well-versed in agile transformation principles.

But what if you could predict what will matter most to customers? You'd be looking into the future and investing in innovation with greater certainty and at lower risk.

Using techniques that I'll describe later, it is possible to decode the ‘units of progress’ that are likely to matter most to your customers, and that actually ...