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Executive with a Track Record in Developing Growth Strategies and Solutions: I have devised and implemented winning strategies that have opened up new markets and business opportunities. I have developed strategies that address customer/market needs, secured buy-in from executives/board, motivated the functional organizations to deliver and launched successful products & business models.

 

Family Man: I enjoy spending time with my beautiful wife and two lovely kids. As a family we are a good mix of outdoors and indoors. My son and I are pretty much outdoors and sports oriented while my daughter and my wife like the indoors. This diversity of interests helps us maintain good balance in our lives.

Category: Innovation Frameworks

There are 6 posts published under Innovation Frameworks.
1 Aug, 2013

5 Steps for Setting Innovation Goals

Innovation Challenges

Innovation is not easy, as it usually involves developing something that has not been done before with the hope that the target audiences like the end results. Not only that, throughout this journey many variables need to managed, like executive sponsorship for innovation, funding, employee motivation, customer interest, product development and marketing, supporters and naysayers, just to name a few. It is challenging to make sure that these forces align. This is done by having a clear innovation goals well before you start the journey.
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11 Jul, 2013

Don’t Be Surprised By Your Customers – Maker’s Mark Case Study

I wrote this post for Jeffrey Baumgartner and it was posted in his 103 report on 7/3/2013

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makers-mark-bourbon-290x290Mid February 2013, CEO of Maker’s Mark, Rob Samuels was preparing to reverse the biggest marketing blunder in the history of this company. Their decision to water down their bourbon from 45% alcohol content to 42% alcohol content was not received well by the market. This resulted in a backlash from their loyal customer base and gave competitors an opportunity to attack them. more

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12 Jan, 2012

Innovation focused on Customer Experience

During my consulting years I had the good fortune of working on many innovative projects. And I would share one such experience to show the impact of customer experience framework on innovation.

This project was with a networking equipment manufacturing company (makes switches, routers etc for businesses). We were engaged to develop the right strategy and business model to take away the market share from the market leader (800 pound gorilla).

I started by analyzing the market and understanding the customer experience delivered by each player. Given that it was a B2B (business to business) market with long sales cycle, I needed to understand the primary drivers of customer experience. So I immediately plugged myself into an inflight sales opportunity and learned that meeting customer requirements and having a good quality record was table stakes. The next best factor was brand value of the company and the relationship that customer executives had with networking equipment vendor sales staff. Without meeting these three factors, networking equipment vendors were not even invited to the table for discussion. more

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12 Dec, 2011

Customer Knowledge Chasm: Barrier to customer feedback on disruptive innovation

Many books and innovation speakers talk about importance of customer feedback during innovation process. They believe that building something without customer feedback is like gambling, the results are often not predictable and most innovations fail. Innovation success rate across all industries is around 4%, and there are a few preachers who believe this will be improved by gathering lots of customer feedback before building the product.

While there is some truth to that and customer feedback is very useful in many cases, it does not necessarily help innovation in all the cases. And this is because of gaps in customer knowledge, something that I am calling “Customer Knowledge Chasm” more

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29 Nov, 2011

Why Innovation Metrics need to be different from other Business Metrics?

Business Metrics are important for any business, as metrics  motivate employees to do the right thing for the business. Also, metrics help in understanding current business performance and in continuous improvement.

Senior leaders often question the need for separate metrics for innovation projects and established business. They measure both new innovation projects and established businesses using the same metrics. This approach will choke innovation and will lead to more sustaining improvements, and not disruptive innovations. In this blog I highlight the need for separate new innovation metrics. more

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25 Nov, 2011

Understanding non-consumption and barriers to innovation

Have you ever wondered why people use a paper based workflow, when there are more efficient software solutions available for doing the same job? This is referred to as non-consumption, when users prefer not so effective methods for doing a particular job while better solutions are available in the market.

The reason is that non-consumption is most difficult to understand and solve, and it cannot be solved by dreaming up and developing a product within office walls. To disrupt non-consumption, the innovators need to get in front of the customers (those who are non-consumers) and understand why they don’t use the available solutions. Once you understand the reasons you can try to solve for eliminating non-consumption and many times this has nothing to do with the product. In this blog I would highlight few reasons why non-consumption exists, drawing from my experience and reasons suggested in a must read book “The Innovator Guide to Growth “.

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