Customer insights are crucial

New products and services need to start from researched insights and developed by agile teams of subject matter and industry experts.

When implementing a business strategy, a start up company, anticipating a very low success rate will adopt a rapid, scatter gun approach, so called “lean start-up”.

By contrast, a corporation will take a more planned, higher cost approach expecting a higher success rate.

Customer insights are crucial.

As corporations reinvent their innovation processes, they have lots to learn from start-ups, but must realise that “lean start-up” wasn’t designed for their context. They have different goals, different risks, different constraints – none of which is suited to lean start up. Slow decision making and high risk aversion defeats the idea of “lean”. Corporations look on the agility of the start-up world with envy. What might be okay in a start-up, is an expensive and risky approach for a company with an existing customer base, history and brand. (Remember Coca Cola Cherry?)

Realising that traditional internal innovation is not enough and that external innovation is difficult to manage, corporates are creating a new process.

This new process marries lean start-up thinking with customer insights to produce a different kind of framework. From the start, for best results customer focus needs to be integrated into the process.