How creating experiences for underserved markets can be a key innovation strategy
Image: Dall-E via Bing
GUEST POST from John Bessant
It’s summertime, at least here in the northern hemisphere and chances are that August is a holiday month. Which might well see you sitting somewhere and watching an exotic sunset, glass of something suitably refreshing in your hand. As you see that golden disc slip below the horizon and the wonderful display of red shifting colour begins to settle towards nightfall you might spare a thought for the memory of Tom Gullick who died this month. Because for many of us jetting away to our exotic location might not be happening were it not for his innovation efforts….
An avid bird spotter (he held the record for the most birds (over 9000) spotted by an individual) he was a bit of a Don Quixote figure, not least because he took up residence in La Mancha in Spain and pursued a conservationist crusade during his later years, saving at least one species of duck from extinction.
But he has another claim to fame — as one of the founding fathers of the low-cost travel experience. His bird-watching abilities gave him good observational skills and led him to spot an opportunity in classic entrepreneurial fashion — and then to go after it with a passion.
Working for a hundred year old firm of shipping brokers (Clarksons) he was given the task one day of getting people to Brussels to attend the World Fair Expo58. The entrepreneur in him rose to the challenge; he chartered a DC-3 plane to fly from Southend airport and arranged coaches, refreshments and even a tour guide, offering the entire package for £6. It worked well but his interest was piqued when he found out that another entrepreneurial member of the party had seen his offer and bought a sheaf of tickets, reselling them via an advert placed in the London ‘Evening Standard’ newspaper for £8! That was the trigger.
Image: Dall-E via Bing
He managed to persuade his rather conservative employers to set up a travel subsidiary and became a pioneer of what became known as package holidays. Coming after years of post-war austerity his offer of trips to places abroad, whether the tourist sights of Belgium or Switzerland or the beaches of the Costa del Sol was avidly taken up. He pitched his offer to those previously underserved by the travel industry, offering experiences to those whose normal holidays might be spent in a beach hut at Bridlington. As he later explained in an interview,
“My happiest moment was standing at Rotterdam airport at the end of the day, watching the buses return from the bulbfields with the Dakota DC-3s lined up waiting to take our customers home. They were so happy because they had never believed they could afford to go abroad.”
Within a decade Clarksons had become one of the major players in a market which was exploding with pent-up demand. They offered a wide variety of experiences, from wine tours in France to trips along the Norwegian fjords; their sunshine holiday business was particularly popular , built on a fixed price all inclusive model delivered at low cost. His skills as negotiator helped deliver this — he could guarantee to fill hotels or aircraft if the supplier was prepared to offer competitive pricing.
Other companies joined the party and it wasn’t just the British who were travelling; increasingly horizons for European tourists were extending. Inevitably this brought a highly competitive edge to the market and required a business strategy based on investing in being able to deliver experiences by assembling the different elements and engineering them down to a package with a thin profit margin. He found increasing difficulty in explaining this to a company whose core business in ship-broking operated on very different models and so he finally left in 1972, retiring to Spain to begin his second career as a bird watcher /conservationist.
He got out just in time; by 1974 cut-throat competition from the growing number of players, a devalued UK pound and the emerging oil crisis with its pressure on fuel costs forced Clarksons into collapse in the middle of the summer tourist season.
Image” Dall-E via BIng
The business model hadn’t failed — but it did need development and fast learning. All the pieces were there — interesting destinations, hotels, buses, aircraft and so on. The difference was in the market — classically growing at the edges of an existing one. But bringing this new business model to life required reframing how both product and process worked. Margins were thin and so new approaches were needed to booking and operations, while delivering the package experience required a new profession — the tour rep — who would need enormous versatility (dealing with everything from entertainment, health and safety, administration, currency exchange, etc.) while all the while smiling for the customers!
It wasn’t disruptive innovation — yet. What was going on was learning to serve a very different market with a new experience based on lower cost. But the learning about how that model might work sowed the seeds for what later did become a revolution which transformed the travel industry. The evidence for this is with us today. Low-cost airlines like Ryanair, Wizz or Easyjet have revolutionised the world of short-haul travel and although they faced heavy setbacks during the Covid-19 crisis they are now returning to profitability and popularity.
Image: Wikicommons
But the package holiday was not a new idea. Some 100 years previously a certain Thomas Cook was looking for a new offering for his growing travel business. Originally a printer and Baptist lay preacher he’d built his original business organising day trips; his first didn’t run too far (the relatively short hop from his home town of Leicester to nearby Loughborough) but in 1841 it gave birth to his travel business. Four years later and he’d clearly tapped into a rich potential market; his trip to the seaside at Liverpool was booked by 1200 people and he had to repeat it two weeks later for another 800 happy travellers.
Cook began to extend his trips across the Channel and by 1863 had seen the possibilities of offering people the opportunity to see far-off places and sights (like the famous Mount Rigi in Switzerland) for themselves. In doing so he pioneered what effectively became the package tour, organizing not only the travel (by road, rail, boat, even mules) and accommodation but also providing guides to help conduct the tour.
Mind you his tour was not for the faint-hearted. In her diaries an intrepid young woman, Jemima Morrell described in detail a world of 4am alarm calls, 20-mile hikes and other challenges — not least of which was also being able to dress for dinner every evening in the hotels in which she stayed! But she clearly felt it was worth it for the experience.
“The days spent on foot, or by the sides of mules, afford the greatest satisfaction …..It was then that, away from the life of the city, we were taken into the midst of the great wonders of nature and seemed to leave the fashion of this world at a distance … It was an entire change; the usual routine of life was gone. All memory of times and seasons faded away and we lived only in the enjoyment of the present.”
Thomas Cook’s ideas changed several things. From the point of view of Switzerland it helped transform a poor rural economy into a travel destination; today the Swiss Alps are one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.
Cook also created a system-level innovation, much as Henry Ford was to do with the motor car fifty years later. Putting together a successful package tour involves much more than simply arranging travel and tickets. Cook pioneered the complex logistics, arranged for integration of different travel and accommodation options, provided a system of coupons (the forerunners of traveller’s cheques) to help pay for goods and services, developed a network of guides and other support staff and printed brochures not only as sales tools but as a way of engaging customers in imagining and dreaming about the journey they were about to embark upon. In doing so he can rightly be considered one of the founding fathers of an industry which today is worth over $7 trillion.
What he pioneered was ‘experience innovation’ — not simply offering travel but a whole new experience. In his case it was the wonders of the Grand Tour brought to everyone, in Clarksons’ case it was the joys of sun-drenched beaches, endless sangria and exotic food to try.
‘Position innovation’ of this kind begins with a reframing of possibilities — classic entrepreneurial territory. Tom Gullick saw an opportunity in meeting needs for a different group and packaging the experience up rather than leaving them to select their own. Travel agents were involved at the time because the infrastructure for booking wasn’t developed; the later low cost revolution saw increasing disintermediation and the emergence of platform models where you buy your travel, car hire, hotel, parking, currency, anything else you might want, all of it via a one stop online platform.
But in order to meet the needs of an unserved or underserved market requires close interaction and fast learning with that market. By definition it doesn’t exist yet in developed form so the process of co-evolving with it is going to involve a bumpy ride. The Clarkson experience was one of experimentation and building fast learning — from the prototype of Expo58 to the slick summer exodus managed in the heydays of the 1970s.
This is challenging but it also means that position innovation can provide a valuable learning laboratory for those wanting to get out of the box which serving the mainstream market can sometimes represent.
A good example is the fascination (and huge market potential) of digital wallets and mobile money. We’re still (well I am) excited by the fact that we can now use our phones to pay for a whole raft of goods and services and the potential is of course huge. Given an accelerating shove by Covid-19 the shift towards a cashless society has been rapid. Not for nothing is Elon Musk trying to create a new brand X (why do I think of washing powder when I hear that?!!!) and give the bird the bird? It’s got little to do with messaging and everything to do with trying to emulate the power of the WeChat platform in China which is an ‘everything app.’ But at its heart it is about mobile money — so much so that even beggars in China have QR codes so that you can support them with a click of your phone button.
So the cutting edge of innovation — right? Not necessarily. If you live in East Africa you might greet a lot of this with a yawn, it’s nothing special or new. Because M-PESA has been enabling this for over a decade, so much so that the mobile money app running on any phone now accounts for over 50% of all GDP transactions in Kenya and is widely used across much of Africa. What is M-PESA? Essentially it’s a mobile money app which was developed originally as a joint venture between Safaricom (Vodafone’s South African subsidiary) and the UK Department for International Development. The name comes from the Swahili pesa meaning money and the original idea began as a development aid project to enable microfinance repayments. Launched in 2007 it is now used by close to 20 million people and the system processes more payments than Western Union does across its entire global network.
What’s gone on, of course, is a classic piece of position innovation where learning has driven improvements and developments, not only to serve the new market but in products and processes to enable it to grow. And it’s created a platform economy, bringing in shops, transport, government services, etc. — and all of this with the innovative support of the central bank. It’s a model which has grown beyond Kenya to have world-wide impact. For example a valuable spin-off has been the use of this technology to enable more efficient aid distribution to help cope with humanitarian crises.
So position innovation matters and should form a key plank in our innovation strategy. It’s at the heart of the innovator’s dilemma — the emergence of innovation at the fringes of your core market was the threat so potently identified by Clayton Christensen. How you deal with that strategic challenge is still a major question — but making sure you spot emerging position innovation early at least buys you time to think through a strategic response.
And for entrepreneurs looking for new opportunities the challenge is simple — spot a market before it exists and then grow it! Not an easy thing to do when you can’t analyse or run focus groups about it. But — as Thomas Cook and later on Tom Gullick found out, being prepared to experiment can pay off handsomely. Which is why it might be worth raising a holiday glass in their direction to remind ourselves of the challenge…
Image: Dall-E via Bing
You can find a podcast version of this here and a video version here
What if a tool had the power to delight your customers, cut your costs, increase your bottom line, and maybe double your stock price? You’d use it, right?
That’s precisely the power and impact of Service Design and service blueprints. Yet very few people, especially in the US, know, understand, or use them. Including me.
Thankfully, Leala Abbott, a strategist and researcher at the intersection of experience, innovation, and digital transformation and a lecturer at Parsons School of Design, clued me in.
What is Service Design?
RB: Hi, Leala, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.
LA: My pleasure! I’m excited about this topic. I’ve managed teams with service designers, and I’ve always been impressed by the magical way they brought together experience strategy, UX, and operations.
RB: I felt the same way after you explained it to me. Before we get too geeked up about the topic, let’s go back to the beginning and define “service.”
LA:Service is something that helps someone accomplish a goal. As a result, every business needs service design because every business is in the service industry.
RB: I’ll be honest, I got a little agitated when I read that because that’s how I define “solution.” But then I saw your illustration explaining that service design moves us from seeing and problem-solving isolated moments to seeing an integrated process. And that’s when it clicked.
LA: That illustration is from Lou Downe’s talk Design in Government Impact for All . Service Design helps us identify what customers want and how to deliver those services effectively by bringing together all the pieces within the organization. It moves us away from fragmented experiences created by different departments and teams within the same company to an integrated process that enables customers to achieve their goals.
Why You Need It
RB: It seems so obvious when you say it. Yet so often, the innovation team spends all their time focused on the customer only to develop the perfect solution that, when they toss it over the wall for colleagues to make, they’re told it’s not possible, and everything stops. Why aren’t we always considering both sides?
LA: One reason, I think, is people don’t want to add one more person to the team. Over the past two decades, the number of individuals required to build something has grown exponentially. It used to be that one person could build your whole website, but now you need user experience designers, researchers, product managers, and more. I think it’s just overwhelming for people to add another individual to the mix. We believe we have all the tools to fix the problem, so we don’t want to add another voice, even if that voice explains the huge disconnect between everything built and their operational failures.
RB: Speaking of operational failures, one of the most surprising things about Service Design is that it almost always results in cost savings. That’s not something most people think about when they hear “design.”
LA: The significant impact on the bottom line is one of the most persuasive aspects of service design. It shifts the focus from pretty pictures to the actual cost implications. Bringing in the operational side of the business is crucial. Building a great customer journey and experience is important, but it’s also important to tie it back to lost revenue and increased cost to serve
Proof It Works
LA: One of the most compelling cases I recently read was about Autodesk’s transition to SaaS, they brought in a service design company called Future Proof. Autodesk wanted to transition from a software licensing model to a software-as-a-service model. It’s a significant transition not just in terms of the business model and pricing but also in how it affects customers.
If you’re a customer of Autodesk, you used to pay a one-time fee for your software, but now you are paying based on users and services. Budgeting becomes messy. The costs are no longer simple and predictable. Plus, it raises lots of questions about the transition, cost predictability, control over access, managing subscriptions, and flexibility. Notice that these issues are about people managing their money and increasing costs. These are the areas where service design can truly help.
Future Proof conducted customer interviews, analyzed each stage of the customer journey, looked at pricing models and renewal protocols, and performed usability studies. When they audited support ticket data for the top five common customer issues, they realized that if Autodesk didn’t change their model, the cost of running software for every customer would increase by 40%, and profit margins would decrease by 15% to 20%.
Autodesk made the change, revenue increased significantly, and their stock price doubled. Service design allows for this kind of analysis and consideration of operational costs.
How to Learn More
RB: Wow, not many things can deliver better service, happier customers, and doubling a stock price. Solid proof that companies, and innovation teams in particular, need to get smart on service design. We’ve talked a lot about the What and Why of Service Design. How can people learn more about the How?
Ever since Eric Reis published his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) has captured the imagination of entrepreneurs and product developers everywhere. The idea of testing products faster and cheaper has an intuitive logic that simply can’t be denied.
Yet what is often missed is that a minimum viable product isn’t merely a stripped down version of a prototype. It is a method to test assumptions and that’s something very different. A single product often has multiple MVPs, because any product development effort is based on multiple assumptions.
Developing an MVP isn’t just about moving faster and cheaper, but also minimizing risk. In order to test assumptions, you first need to identify them and that’s a soul searching process. You have to take a hard look at what you believe, why you believe it and how those ideas can be evaluated. Essentially, MVP’s work because they force you to do the hard thinking early.
Every Idea Has Assumptions Built In
In 1990, Nick Swinmurn had an idea for a business. He intended to create a website to sell shoes much like Amazon did for books. This was at the height of the dotcom mania, when sites were popping up to sell everything from fashion to pet food to groceries, so the idea itself wasn’t all that original or unusual.
What Swinmurn did next, however, was. Rather than just assuming that people would be willing to buy shoes online or conducting expensive marketing research, he built a very basic site, went to a shoe store and took pictures of shoes, which he placed on the site. When he got an order, he bought the shoes retail and shipped them out. He lost money on every sale.
That’s a terrible way to run a business, but a great — and incredibly cheap — way to to test a business idea. Once he knew that people were willing to buy shoes online, he began to build all the elements of a fully functioning business. Ten years later, the company he created, Zappos was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion.
Notice how he didn’t just assume that his business idea was viable. He tested it and validated it. He also learned other things, such as what styles were most popular. Later, Zappos expanded to include handbags, eyewear, clothing, watches, and kids’ merchandise.
The Cautionary Tale Of Google Glass
Now compare how Swinmurn launched his business with Google’s Glass debacle. Instead of starting with an MVP, it announced a full-fledged prototype complete with a snazzy video. Through augmented reality projected onto the lenses, users could seamlessly navigate an urban landscape, send and receive messages and take photos and videos. It generated a lot of excitement and seemed like a revolutionary new way to interact with technology.
Yet criticism quickly erupted. Many were horrified that hordes of wandering techno-hipsters could be surreptitiously recording us. Others had safety concerns about everything from people being distracted while driving to the devices being vulnerable to hacking. Soon there was a brewing revolt against “Google Glassholes.”
Situations like the Google Glass launch are startlingly common. In fact, the vast majority of new product launches fail because there’s no real way to know whether you have the right product-market fit customers actually get a chance to interact with the product. Unfortunately, most product development efforts start by seeking out the largest addressable market. That’s almost always a mistake.
If you are truly creating something new and different, you want to build for the few and not the many. That’s the mistake that Google made with its Glass prototype.
Identifying A Hair On Fire Use Case
The alternative to trying to address the largest addressable market is to identify a hair-on-fire use case. The idea is to find a potential customer that needs to solve a problem so badly that they almost literally have their hair on fire. These customers will be more willing to co-create with you and more likely to put up with the inevitable bugs and glitches that always come up.
For example, Tesla didn’t start out by trying to build an electric car for the masses. Instead, it created a $100,000 status symbol for Silicon Valley millionaires. Because these customers could afford multiple cars, range wasn’t as much of a concern. The high price tag also made a larger battery more feasible. The original Tesla Roadster had a range of 244 miles.
The Silicon Valley set were customers with their hair on fire. They wanted to be seen as stylish and eco-friendly, so were willing to put up with the inevitable limitations of electric cars. They didn’t have to depend on them for their commute or to pick the kids up at soccer practice. As long as the car was cool enough, they would buy it.
Interestingly, Google Glass made a comeback as an industrial product and had a nice run from 2019 to 2023 before they went away for good. For hipsters, an augmented reality product is far from a necessity, but a business that needs to improve productivity can be a true “hair-on-fire” use case. As the product improves and gains traction, it’s entirely possible that it eventually makes its way back to the consumer market in some form.
Using An MVP To Pursue A Grand Challenge
One of the criticisms of minimum viable products is that they are only suited for simple products and tweaks, rather than truly ambitious projects. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that the higher your ambitions, the more important it is for you to start with a minimum viable product.
IBM is one company that has a long history of pursuing grand challenges such as the Deep Blue project which defeated world champion Garry Kasparov at chess and the Blue Gene project which created a new class of “massively parallel” supercomputers. More recently were the Jeopardy grand challenge, which led to the development of its current Watson business and the Debater project.
Notice that none of these were fully featured products. Rather they were attempts to, as IBM’s Chief Innovation Officer, Bernie Meyerson, put it to me, invent something that “even experts in the field, regard as an epiphany and changes assumptions about what’s possible.” That would be hard to do if you were trying to create a full featured product for a demanding customer.
That’s the advantage of creating an MVP. It essentially acts as a research lab where you can safely test hypotheses and eliminate sources of uncertainty. Once you’ve done that, you can get started trying to build a real business.
What does it mean to have a mindset? How does it shape your actions, and those of the people you interact with? Is it steadfast, or does it evolve? Could it perhaps be a fusion of elements? It’s crucial to understand mindsets as they influence not only our behaviors but also the behaviors of those we engage with, allowing us to better navigate the world.
Research defines “mindset” as a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and interprets information, orienting an individual’s understanding of experiences and guiding their responses and actions. This definition, adapted from Carol Dweck by Salovey and Achor, illuminates that our mindset, composed of our thoughts and beliefs, influences our perception of ourselves, our environment, and the broader world. Such understanding is vital in team dynamics, leadership, and organizational contexts.
Dweck identified two primary mindsets:
A fixed mindset, in which intelligence is viewed as static, leading to the desire to appear intelligent and influencing specific behaviors.
A growth mindset, where intelligence is seen as something that can be developed, sparking a desire to learn and driving diverse behaviors.
The growth mindset, characterized by the belief that abilities can be honed with consistent effort, is shaped by how we perceive and tackle five critical areas:
Viewing effort as a path to mastery
Demonstrating persistence in the face of obstacles
Seeing others’ success as a source of inspiration and learning
Embracing challenges
Welcoming criticism as an opportunity to learn and grow
However, we need to acknowledge that our mindsets aren’t strictly “fixed” or “growth” in nature. They’re typically a hybrid of both, influenced by the context and phase of our lives. It’s is also situational. Our response to situations can shift, revealing the dominance of one mindset over the other at different times. Recognizing this within ourselves and avoiding prematurely labeling others is vital.
Here are a few case study examples:
Case Study 1 – Education
To give a practical example, let’s look at the world of education. Imagine a student who struggles with math. With a fixed mindset, they might think, “I’m just not good at math,” and subsequently put less effort into learning. However, if they adopt a growth mindset, they would perceive math as a challenge they can overcome with practice and effort. Using different strategies and seeking help when necessary, the student’s math skills can improve, highlighting the practical application of a growth mindset.
Case Study 2 – Microsoft
In the business world, Microsoft provides an excellent case study. Under CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft shifted from a fixed to a growth mindset. Nadella introduced Dweck’s growth mindset concept to the company culture, fostering innovation and collaboration. The shift, encapsulated in the motto “Learn it all” vs. “Know it all,” encouraged employees to remain open-minded, learn from their mistakes, and continually improve. This change in mindset led to increased employee engagement, innovation, and contributed to Microsoft’s recent growth.
Case Study 3 – Sports
In sports, athletes often exemplify the growth mindset. Consider basketball legend Michael Jordan. He was cut from his high school varsity team because he was deemed “not good enough.” Rather than accepting this as an unchangeable state, he viewed it as a challenge and redoubled his efforts to improve. His eventual rise to becoming one of the greatest basketball players of all time showcases how a growth mindset can lead to superior performance in the face of setbacks and criticism.
Conclusion
As I often say, “The essence of the growth mindset in an organizational context is to instill a mindset focused on continuous improvement rather than the need to prove that one is the best.”
Implementing the growth mindset in team dynamics is part of my work. However, it doesn’t stand alone. It must be complemented by other factors like fostering a learning culture, ensuring psychological safety, and navigating the comfort zone. All these components are critical to effective team, leadership, and organizational development.
Image Credit: Stefan Lindegaard
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But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:
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If you could get another good job at the drop of a hat, how would you work differently? Would you speak your mind or bite your tongue?
If you didn’t care about getting a promotion, would you succumb to groupthink or dissent?
If your ego didn’t get in the way, would you stop following the worn-out recipe and make a new one?
If you don’t judge yourself by the number of people who work for you, would your work be better? Would you choose to work on different projects? How do you feel about that?
If you knew your time at the company was finite, how would your contribution change? Who would you stop working with? Who would you start working with? Wouldn’t that feel good?
If you didn’t care about your yearly rating, wouldn’t your rating improve?
If you cared more about helping others, wouldn’t your talents (and the returns) be multiplied?
If your time horizon was doubled, wouldn’t work on projects that are important at the expense of those that are urgent?
If your ego didn’t block you from working on projects that might fail, wouldn’t you work on projects that could obsolete your best work?
If you cared about the long-term success of the company, wouldn’t you work more with young people to get them ready for the next decade?
If you cared solely about doing the right projects in the right way, wouldn’t you help your best team members move to the most important projects, even if that meant they worked for someone else?
If you cared about helping people develop, would you formalize their development areas and help them grow, or take the easy route and let them flounder?
If you didn’t care about getting the credit, how would you and your work be different? Would the company be better for it? How about your happiness?
If you declined every other meeting and just read the meeting minutes, would that be a problem? And even if there are no meeting minutes to read, don’t you think that you’d get along just fine? And don’t you think you’d get more done?
What would you have to change to work more often with young people?
What would you have to change so your best people could be moved to the most important projects?
What would you have to change so you’d dissent when that’s what’s needed?
What would you have to change to develop others, even if it cost you a promotion?
What would you have to change so you could ditch the urgent projects and start the meaningful ones?
What would you have to change so you could spend more time developing young talent?
What would you have to change so you could attend fewer meetings and make more progress?
What would you have to change so you could work on the most outlandish projects?
What’s in the way of looking inside and figuring out how to live differently?
If you were able to change, who would you start work with? Who would you stop working with? Which projects would you start and which would you stop? Which meetings would you skip? Who are the three young people you’d help grow?
If you were able to change, would you be better for it? And how about the people that work with you? And how about your family? And wouldn’t your company be better for it?
So I ask you – What’s in the way? And what are you going to do about it?
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Several years ago, my now-husband and I were in London. It was his first time in the city but my 4th or 5th so, naturally, I talked a big game about how well I knew the city and how I would be, with the help of our handy tourist map, our tour guide.
Things were going fine until I took the wrong road leading away from Buckingham Palace. I thought we were heading straight to Parliament. We were not.
After a walk that lasted far longer than it should have, he nervously asked,” We’re lost, aren’t we?”
With wounded pride and astounding stubbornness, I declared, “We’re not lost. I know exactly where we are. It’s just not where we want to be.”
Maps are incredibly useful. Until they’re not.
Innovation literature has more maps than a Rick Steves’ guidebook, and most are quite useful. If they’re used at the right time for the right purposes in the right way by the right people (which is a lot of rights that have to be right).
Here are three of my favorites – 2 classics and a new one that blew my mind
Stakeholder Map:
Avoid getting blind-sided, buttering up the wrong people, or ignoring potential champions
What it is: A visual representation of the people, roles, and groups who (1) are involved in and affected by a challenge or system and (2) have the power to affect or are likely to be affected by the proposed solution. Stakeholders can be internal and/or external to the organization
Why you need one: To prioritize where and how you spend your time understanding, influencing, communicating, collaborating, persuading, and selling
When to create it: At the very beginning of a project and then updating as you learn more
Brainstorm who your internal AND external stakeholders are
Prioritize them using an Influence x Interest two-by-two matrix
Engage and communicate based on their place in the chart
Journey Map
Spot opportunities to create radical value through incremental innovations
What it is: A visual representation of what your customer/consumer/user does, thinks, and feels as they move from awareness of a need/want/JTBD to loyalty to a solution. Journey maps should dig deep into moments where customers currently interact with your organization and highlight opportunities where interaction can and should occur
Why you need one: To identify opportunities for innovation by surfacing customer current pain points between your customer and your business (or competitors if your business isn’t there and can/should be)
When to create it:
Create the basic structure (start and end point) or a hypothesized journey before primary research.
During research, work with individual stakeholders to develop their maps using (and adapting) your initial structure.
At the end of research and before ideation, synthesize insights into the smallest possible number of maps to use as inspiration for solution brainstorming
How to use it: IDEO offers simple instructions and tips based on practical use:
Brainstorm who your internal AND external stakeholders are
Prioritize them using an Influence x Interest two-by-two matrix
Engage and communicate based on their place in the chart
Service Map:
Make journey maps actionable (and see how your innovation affects your operations)
What it is: A visual representation of the people, touchpoints, processes, and technology required/desired both frontstage (what customers see) and backstage (what happens behind the scenes). Similar to process documentation with a special focus on the customer
Why you need one: Doing something new (i.e., innovating) often requires changes to internal operations, organizations, and processes, but these changes are often ignored or unexplored until late in the process, potentially slowing or stopping the development and launch of a new solution.
When to create it: Draft a baseline current state once you have 50% confidence in the general area or type of solution to be created (e.g., we want to improve the use of digital tools in classrooms, so let’s create a service map for our current digital offerings and operations). Then continually revise and update it as the solution/service develops.
Many say that coding is the new literacy. Kids are encouraged to learn programming in school and take coding courses online. In that famous scene in The Graduate Dustin Hoffman’s character was encouraged by a family friend to go into plastics. If it were shot today, it would have probably been computer code.
This isn’t actually that new. I remember first being taught how to code in middle school in the early 80s in BASIC (a mostly defunct language now). Yet even today, coding is far from an essential skill. In fact, with the rise of no-code platforms, there is a strong argument to be made that code is becoming less important.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of coding to be done on the back end and programming is certainly a perfectly reasonable thing to learn. However, there’s no reason people need to learn it to have a successful, productive career. On the other hand writing, as well as other communication skills, will only become more important in the decades to com.
The Future Is Not Digital
During the past few decades, digital technology has become largely synonymous with innovation. Every 18 months or so, a new generation of processors has come out that was faster, more powerful and cheaper than its predecessors. Entrepreneurs would leverage these new capabilities to create exciting new products and disrupt entire industries.
Yet now that’s all coming to an end. Every technology eventually hits theoretical limits and that’s where we are now with regard to digital processors. We have maybe one or two generations of advancement and then, with some clever workarounds, we may be able to stretch the technology for a decade or so, but it’s highly unlikely that it’ll last any longer than that.
That’s not so horrible. There’s no 11th Commandment that says, “Thou shalt compute in ones and zeroes,” and there are nascent architectures that are potentially far more powerful than digital computers, such as quantum and neuromorphic computing. Neither of these, however are digital technologies. They operate on fundamentally different logic and will use different code.
So instead of learning to code, maybe our kids would be better served by learning about quantum mechanics or neurology. Those would seem to be far more relevant to their future.
The Shift From Bits To Atoms
Digital technology is largely virtual. Transistors on silicon wafers compute ones and zeroes so that images can flash across our screens. That can be very useful, because we can simulate things on a screen much more cheaply than in the physical world, but it’s also limited. We can’t eat, wear or live in a virtual world.
The important technologies of the next generation, however, will be based on atoms rather than bits. Advances in genomics have led to the new field of synthetic biology and a revolution in materials science is transforming our ability to develop advance materials for manufacturing, clean energy and space exploration. So maybe instead of learning how to code, kids should be studying genetics and chemistry.
As we develop new technologies, we will also need to design experiences so that we can use them more effectively. For example, we need linguists and conversational analysts to design better voice interfaces. Kids who study those things may be able to build great careers.
The rapid pace of technological advancement over the next generation will surely put stress on society. Digital technology has helped produce massive income inequality and a rise in extremism. We will need sociologists and political scientists to help us figure out how to cope with these new, much more powerful technologies.
Collaboration Is The New Competitive Advantage
When my generation was in school, we were preparing for a future that seemed pretty clear cut. We assumed we would become doctors, lawyers, executives and engineers and spend our entire lives working in our chosen fields. It didn’t turn out that way. These days a business model is unlikely to last a decade, much less a lifetime.
Kids today need to prepare to become lifelong learners because the pace of change will not slow down. In fact, it is likely to accelerate beyond anything we can imagine today. The one thing we can predict about the future is that collaboration will be critical for success. People like geneticists and quantum scientists will need to work closely with chemists, designers sociologists and specialists in fields that haven’t even been invented yet.
These are, in fact, longstanding trends. The journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper today has four times as many authors as one did in 1950 and the work they are doing is far more interdisciplinary and done at greater distances than in the past. We can only expect these trends to become more prominent in the future.
In order to collaborate effectively, you need to communicate effectively and that’s where writing comes in. Being able to express thoughts and ideas clearly and cogently is absolutely essential to collaboration and innovation.
Writing Well Is Thinking Well
Probably the most overlooked aspect of writing is that it does more than communicate thoughts, but helps form them. As Fareed Zakaria has put it. “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.”
“Whether you’re a novelist, a businessman, a marketing consultant or a historian,” he continues, “writing forces you to make choices and it brings clarity and order to your ideas.” Zakaria also points to Jeff Bezos’ emphasis on memo writing as an example of how clarity of expression leads to innovation.
In fact, Amazon considers writing so essential to its ability to innovate that it has become a key part of its culture. It’s hard to make much of a career at Amazon if you cannot write well, because to create products and services that are technically sound, easy to use and efficiently executed, a diverse group of highly skilled people need to tightly coordinate their efforts.
Today, as the digital revolution comes to an end and we enter a new era of innovation, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the rapid advancement of breakthrough technologies. However, the key to success in our uncertain future will be humans collaborating with other humans to design work for machines. That starts with writing effectively.
When you try something new, check to see who has done something similar. Decompose their design approach. What were they trying to achieve? What outcome were they looking for? Who were their target customers? Do this for at least three existing designs – three real examples that are for sale today.
Here’s a rule to live by: When trying something new, don’t start from scratch.
What you are trying to achieve is unique, but has some commonality with existing solutions. The outcome you are looking for is unique, but it’s similar to outcomes others have tried to achieve. Your target customers are unique, but some of their characteristics are similar to the customers of the solutions you’ll decompose.
Here’s another rule: There are no “clean sheet” sheet designs, so don’t try to make one.
There was an old game show called Name That Tune, where contestants would try to guess the name of a song by hearing just a few notes. The player wins when they can name the tune with the *fewest* notes. And it’s the same with new designs – you want to provide a novel customer experience using the fewest new notes.
A rule: Reuse what you can, until you can’t.
Because the customer is the one who decides if your new offering offers them new value, the novel elements of your design don’t have to look drastically different in a side-by-side comparison way. But the novel elements of your offering do have to make a significant difference in the customer’s life. With that said, however, it can be helpful if the design element responsible for the novel goodness is visually different from the existing alternatives. But if that’s not the case, you can add a non-functional element to the novelty-generating element to make it visible to the customer. For example, you could add color, or some type of fingerprint, to the novel element of the design so that customers can see what creates the novelty for them. Then, of course, you market the heck out of the new color or fingerprint.
A rule: It’s better to make a difference in a customer’s life than, well, anything else.
Don’t be shy about learning from what other companies have done well. That’s not to say you should violate their patents, but it’s a compliment when you adopt some of their best stuff. Learn from them and twist it. Understand what they did and abstract it. See the best in two designs and combine them. See the goodness in one domain and bring it to another.
Doing something for the first time is difficult, why not get inspiration from others and make it easier?
Image credit: Unsplash
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