Monetizing Innovation

Book description

Surprising rules for successful monetization

Innovation is the most important driver of growth. Today, more than ever, companies need to innovate to survive. But successful innovation—measured in dollars and cents—is a very hard target to hit. 

Companies obsess over being creative and innovative and spend significant time and expense in designing and building products, yet struggle to monetize them: 72% of innovations fail to meet their financial targets—or fail entirely. Many companies have come to accept that a high failure rate, and the billions of dollars lost annually, is just the cost of doing business.

Monetizing Innovations argues that this is tragic, wasteful, and wrong.

Radically improving the odds that your innovation will succeed is just a matter of removing the guesswork. That happens when you put customer demand and willingness to pay in the driver seat—when you design the product around the price. It’s a new paradigm, and that opens the door to true game change: You can stop hoping to monetize, and start knowing that you will.

The authors at Simon Kucher know what they’re talking about. As the world’s premier pricing and monetization consulting services company, with 800 professionals in 30 cities around the globe, they have helped clients ranging from massive pharmaceuticals to fast-growing startups find success. In Monetizing Innovation, they distil the lessons of thirty years and over 10,000 projects into a practical, nine-step approach. Whether you are a CEO, executive leadership, or part of the team responsible for innovation and new product development, this book is for you, with special sections and checklist-driven summaries to make monetizing innovation part of your company’s DNA. Illustrative case studies show how some of the world’s best innovative companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Porsche, Optimizely, Draeger, Swarovski and big pharmaceutical companies have used principles outlined in this book.

A direct challenge to the status quo “spray and pray” style of innovation, Monetizing Innovation presents a practical approach that can be adopted by any organization, in any industry. Most monetizing innovation failure point home. Now more than ever, companies must rethink the practices that have lost countless billions of dollars. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, and a clear promise: Go from hope to certainty.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Praise for Monetizing Innovation
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Foreword
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Part One: The Monetizing Innovation Problem
    1. Chapter 1: How Innovators Leave Billions on the Table
      1. Why the Majority of New Products Fail
      2. Successful Innovation Matters More Than Ever
      3. The Good News: Monetizing Innovation Failures Come in Only Four Varieties
      4. You Can Avoid Failure—but Only If You Play by Different Rules
    2. Chapter 2: Feature Shocks, Minivations, Hidden Gems, and Undeads
      1. Flavor 1: Feature Shocks—When You Give Too Much and Get Too Little
      2. Flavor 2: Minivations—When You Ask for Too Little, That's What You Get
      3. Flavor 3: Hidden Gems—When You Don't Look, You're Not Going to Find Them
      4. Flavor 4: Undeads—When Nobody Wants Your Product
      5. These Four Monetizing Innovation Failures Can Be Avoided
    3. Chapter 3: Why Good People Get It Wrong
      1. Myths and Misconceptions with the Prevailing Mindset
      2. Embracing a New Paradigm
      3. Introduction to Part 2
  9. Part Two: Nine Surprising Rules for Successful Monetization
    1. Chapter 4: Have the “Willingness-to-Pay” Talk Early
      1. How an Early Willingness-to-Pay Talk Propelled Gillette
      2. Why You Should Have the Talk Early: The Three Benefits
      3. The Information You Need from Those Early Pricing Talks
      4. Insights, Tips, and Tricks
    2. Chapter 5: Don't Default to a One-Size-Fits-All Solution
      1. A Paper Company's Segmentation Story
      2. Typical Pitfalls of Segmentation
      3. What Best-in-Class Companies Do
      4. Insights, Tips, and Tricks
    3. Chapter 6: When Designing Products, Configuration and Bundling is More Science Than Art
      1. Product Configuration Done Right
      2. Bundling Done Right
      3. Microsoft Office: A Bundling Blockbuster
      4. Two Key Principles of Product Configuration and Bundling
      5. Insights, Tips, and Tricks
    4. Chapter 7: Go beyond the Price Point
      1. How You Charge Trumps What You Charge
      2. Innovative Monetization Models: More the Rule Than the Exception
      3. Five Powerful Monetization Models
      4. Five Questions to Choose the Right Monetization Model
    5. Chapter 8: Price Low for Market Share or High for Premium Branding?
      1. Creating the Pricing Strategy Document: The Four Building Blocks
    6. Chapter 9: From Hoping to Knowing
      1. How Auto Auctioneer Manheim Tested a New Offering
      2. Why WTP Is Essential For Your Business Case
      3. Nine Steps to Build a Living Business Case
    7. Chapter 10: The Innovation Won't Speak for Itself
      1. A Few Shining Examples of Value Communications
      2. So Why Is Value Messaging Difficult?
      3. The Three Steps to Create Great Value Communications
    8. Chapter 11: Use Behavioral Pricing Tactics to Persuade and Sell
      1. The Behavioral Pricing Dilemma of an Internet Start-Up Company
      2. Six Behavioral Pricing Tactics That Make the Difference
      3. Don't Guess: Put Behavioral Tactics to the Test
    9. Chapter 12: Maintain Your Price Integrity
      1. The Importance of Patience in Maintaining Price Integrity
      2. How to Prepare for Post-Launch
      3. Price Wars: The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play
  10. Part Three: Success Stories and Implementation
    1. Chapter 13: Learning from the Best
      1. The Porsche Story—Veering Off the Sports Car Track to Create Two Winning Vehicles
      2. LinkedIn—Monetizing the World's Largest Professional Network
      3. Dräger—Collecting the Specs for Successful Industrial Products before Engineering
      4. Uber—Monetizing a Disruptive Innovation through Innovative Price Models
      5. Summary: New Roads
      6. Swarovski—The Payoff from Crystal-Clear Ideas on What Consumers Will Pay
      7. Optimizely—How to Price Breakthrough Innovation
      8. Innovative Pharma—How a Customer Value Driven R&D Approach Boosts Success
    2. Chapter 14: Implementing the “Designing the Product around the Price” Innovation Process
      1. Jump-Start and Pilot
      2. Scale and Stick
      3. The Nine Pitfalls to Implementing a New-Product Monetization Process (and How to Avoid Them)
  11. Index
  12. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Monetizing Innovation
  • Author(s): Madhavan Ramanujam, Georg Tacke
  • Release date: May 2016
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781119240860