"Big Bet" Initiatives and Beating Broken Innovation
Posted by
Alec Maki on Thu, Jan 26, 2012 @ 02:23 PM
When it comes to "big bet" initiatives, innovation is broken. At the very front end (pre-idea), companies struggle to identify good market opportunities. They lack robust decision metrics to help lead them to choose one opportunity over another. Decisions are made in the fog.
It's no wonder companies gravitate towards incremental initiatives! What this does though, is lead them toward "me too" mediocrity, product proliferation and commoditization of choice.
Even if a "big bet" initiative gets funding, traditional tools -- like purchase intent and historical norms -- fail to explain how well a bold new idea delivers against the original opportunity or market insight. Why? Because consumers cannot envision or articulate how well a novel, imaginative product fits into life moments. My point is, traditional tools often "kill" bold new growth ideas, while serving as a chauffeur for more incremental ideas because they fail to understand consumer behavior. To avoid this result, the consumer packaged goods industry should seek to understand how well novel products deliver against existing behavior within the context of the moment.
To do this, a behavior-driven approach must be adopted. This approach evaporates the fog and brings clarity to innovation. It focuses the front-end and proceeds with a clear direction at each step of the innovation process.
That said, we know certain things won't change: Companies still need to make decisions as to what initiatives to keep within their innovation portfolios and which to prune. They still need to make go/no-go decisions at various checkpoints throughout the innovation process.
However, certain things should and can change: for "big bet", companies need better decision-making tools to select innovation initiatives (based on opportunities based on consumer behavior) and to make go/no-go decisions across each initiative (based on how well new products deliver against previously identified behaviors). These things should change in order to beat broken innovation.