Gene Kim

It is critical to understand the customer needs for a successful innovation into a market. Some basic but fundamental questions charts a pathway to creating solutions that satisfies those needs. What are customers trying to achieve? What are customer trying to avoid? How important is it to customers? How satisfied are they with the current solutions available to them?

Having a mentoring system where the beginners are shown around and have people to answer questions on anything for a given period of time is needed. Also, a peer community where they don't feel alone in the organization is also needed.

The majority of the time this becomes an issue is due to the approach to what is important to the market and customer. Oftentimes organizations confuse ‘wants’ and ‘needs’. Appropriate insights that lead the organization to what is actually important to the product and providing the guidance to R&D is important. You will be surprised how many organizations don’t do this correctly.

Need to ask the question why - it can sometimes be a combination of many things (lack of investment, no resources or time to do so, no line time). This is also a question of culture. If there is no balance between risk-reward, then there is no innovation. Most innovations come with some level of stability. If the company is not stable, then finding a group that would be interested in doing innovative things will be very difficult, let along get buy-in to do something innovative. Find your stable ground first.

One area that we focus on is the mentoring aspect for startups. This aspect is critical for the owners/founders, as they have voiced an issue of not being able to 'turn to somebody' to discuss many things about running their startups. There is a tendency to have 'experts' as mentors, but this can sometimes create an atmosphere of contrasting and comparing. Each startup and owner/founder is in a highly unique state of circumstance. Somebody that can be an ear to lend to, and potentially even help with the issue-at-hand, is what many startup owners/founders are looking for.

Open ended 'share your ideas' seldom create the momentum needed within an organization for impactful innovation. Some level of guidance is needed by the leadership team, analogous to setting the corporate strategy, and providing the guidance for the organization to provide ideas within the context of the strategy for the organization. Not saying 'other ideas' are bad, just saying that acceptance and execution on ideas that support the strategy of the organization are typically easier to justify and quicker to implement from a focus standpoint.