Page 180 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Innovating for the Future 169

tions. Do this by actually talking to potential customers—dozens of them—
throughout the process of creating your new product or venture. As a result
of these customer development dialogues, your people can then confirm
the idea, pivot to a better idea, reconfigure it in some way, or drop it alto-
gether. This means that nice and interesting innovation ideas or even sexy
new technologies don’t end up wasting time and resources, but can “fail
fast.” It also means that when you launch new enterprises, the chances of
success are much higher, because you based them on confirmed principles.
We saw this approach in the mortgage servicing innovation app at Thom-
son Reuters and in the exploration of the combined digital and broadcast
approach in the development of the PBS KIDS 24/7 channel (discussed in
chapter 2).
Leaders of teams and organizations are often the ones with the most
outside view, but the lean methodology requires everyone in the process to
connect to potential customers and their understanding of the product. It’s
easy to sit around and congratulate everyone on their innovative ideas or
vote among yourselves about which are most promising. Real innovation
and sustaining value, however, derive only from customers that are willing
to buy your product or utilize your service, and engaging them up front
means that you know you are building something they are interested in.
For example, Avery Dennison, as part of its drive to create sustainable
growth through innovation, launched several innovation teams as a pilot.
Each team took an idea that had been developed within the company and
then went out to potential customers to reshape it and make it more via-
ble. The challenge to each team was to get some first sales results within
100 days, and to do that, they had to find real customers. One team, for ex-
ample, took a foil product used in heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning
applications and reconfigured it into an adhesive tape by talking with po-
tential customers and then partnering with a major home improvement
company. In so doing, it had the first sales in the prescribed 100 days and
then expanded the product from there. Based on this and other pilots,
Avery eventually launched dozens of teams, involving hundreds of people,
and generated millions of dollars in new revenue—a tangible path toward
shaping the future.