Most companies are responding to a market disruption rather than creating one, some innovate beyond expectation. The most popular of our time is obviously Apple and it's amazing products. Why? Common opinion will have you think Steve Jobs is the cause. Well, yes he was the driving force behind the innovation equation but that equation is not his alone, it is actually a documented process polished by Tony Ulwick, originally a Harvard Business Review article and then fleshed out in his book What Customers Want: Using Outcome Driven Innovation to create breakthrough products and services. Outcome Driven Innovation uses a few key practices to leverage the combination for a profitible outcome:

1. study the market at present to identify underserved customer demands (opportunity to solve probelems & serve needs)

2. study what the customer does, not what they say (behavioural observation)

I specifically say 'profitable outcome' not 'drive revenue' because unfortunately most companies think just polishing the way they serve customers will drive revenues - it does initially, but not in terms of being a sustainable market differentiator. Constant innovation is required, as market is constantly changing.

For example; most companies solely focus their customer driven organisation on service models. This is awesome - always serve beyond expectation to ensure advocacy. However, at what cost is that service? Why DISSOLVE the problem all together rather than having an amazing service to manage the problem.

The perfect example is the Strategyn Bosch Case Study. In summary

Product & Service Innovation is such an important part of the new business movement and unfortunately is missed change or restructures when agile consutltants serve companies that aren't web 2.0 businesses. Product Innovation is assumed to be part of an R&D division alone and often Systems Thinking, Lean and Agile is (rightly so) busy looking inwards at the company on how they working RATHER THAN outwards at the market to drive what's actually worth doing. Combining this sort of Customer Driven design at each stage of the agile delivery model is what was at the core of Internode successfully being the first to market with real time NBN services qualification tool in Australia, why they are an NPS leader in the market.

We looked at what the market really wants, where they are being underserved, and delivered quickly using Scrum, XP, and iterative feature releases.

This is my presentation that helped transform the paradigm of thinking and show how user stories can get us closer to customer satisfaction.

http://www.innovationbysouth.com.au/media/CustomerDrivenRequirements_StephanieBysouth.pdf