The Lean Innovation Cycle

Introduction Innovation, Customer Value, and Lean

DOI: 10.4324/9781003206347-1

For companies everywhere, innovation has long been the pre-eminent secret sauce to their successes. There is a growing consensus among CEOs and academics that in order for a company to stay relevant and maintain its position in the marketplace it cannot simply rely on what has worked in the past. Established competitive advantages must give rise to something new, something novel, something disruptive. For a company to survive it must innovate.

By just exactly what is innovation? Contemporary ideas about what innovation is are divergent. These colloquial talking points often excite the mind but hang on some oft-disputed assumptions. Circumventing the pervasive issue ...