instructor Hood's Key Ideas from No-Excuses Innovation
by Walter Herbst, Bruce Vojak

Successful small and medium-sized mature enterprises combine four qualities:

1. Optimization of your production processes using tools like lean six sigma.
2. Incremental innovations, such as improvements to your existing product line or expansion to new markets.
3. Innovations related to product platforms, such as the development of a base product that has qualities that make its market share defendable and that you can use to develop spin-offs that drive conversions.
4. Breakthrough innovations that change the paradigm and shift the basis of competition. 

Design thinking involves a series of concrete activities:

• Come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible – Aim for volume.
• Use empathy to understand the user’s point of view – To come up with the most relevant ideas, do a deep dive into the user’s experience and emotions.
• Embrace creative risk-taking – In order to get to a breakthrough, you have to be open to making mistakes.
• Iterate through rapid prototyping and testing – The best way to manage risk is to do multiple low-cost tests with real users.

“Design is a way to build an experience around the user.”

While it is common to focus on customers’ needs, if you want them to want your product, you have to appeal to their emotions. Products with good emotional design are understandable and easy to use. They answer the customer’s most pressing questions: what, why, where, when, who and how. If you are not appealing to your customers’ emotions, you are left competing strictly on price, forcing you and your competitors to accept narrower and narrower margins.

• The “phase-gate” process divides idea development activities into phases – Each “phase” represents an incrementally larger investment, separated by “gates” where you make a formal decision about whether to continue
• “Lean innovation” reduces wasted resources by testing the “minimum viable product” – Find the simplest, fastest, cheapest version of a product concept that you can test with lead customers and then do so on a small scale
• “Open innovation” lets you outsource certain aspects of innovation
• “Product and technology road maps” help you communicate your innovation options to your customers

To do this, make sure you identify, develop and work with the serial innovators in your business:

• Serial innovators engage with problems with curiosity and possess a drive to understand the problem deeply and look beyond the first or most obvious solution
• They work tenaciously on projects and delve deeply into the customer’s point of view and needs
• They keep in mind that they need to bring ideas to market.
• They see the value in other people and enlist their strengths in the pursuit of their goals
• They work non-linearly: Innovators are always ready to backtrack and reconsider earlier steps

Your strategy connects your vision to your day-to-day activities. There are, broadly, two types of strategies:

“Market share” strategies increase economies of scale by growing your share of the market. You can do this by differentiating your product, lowering its cost or entering a new, unoccupied niche.

“Synergy” strategies increase economies of scope by expanding into different products or markets with activities that can share resources or expertise.

Objective-based planning is a strategic planning method that lets you model the relationship of every level of your organization to your organization’s objectives:

• Objectives define the overarching direction of your organization.
• Goals are “steppi​​​ng stones” towards your objective.
• Strategies are what you choose to focus on to achieve your goals.
• Measures are the quantitative benchmarks that allow you to determine the effectiveness of your strategies.
• Tactics are the fine-grained, short-term actions you take as part of your strategies.

Objective-based planning uses a cascading structure: As you move down the organizational structure to smaller teams and individuals, the strategies of the level above become the objectives of the level below.