Design thinking involves a series of concrete activities:<ul><li>Come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible – Aim for volume.</li><li>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.</li><li>Embrace creative risk-taking – In order to get to a breakthrough, you have to be open to making mistakes.</li><li>Iterate through rapid prototyping and testing – The best way to manage risk is to do multiple low-cost tests with real users.</li></ul>

Design thinking gives you a reliable, low-cost and low-risk way to start innovating

Successful small and medium-sized mature enterprises combine four qualities:<ol><li>Optimization of your production processes using tools like lean six sigma.</li><li>Incremental innovations, such as improvements to your existing product line or expansion to new markets.</li><li>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.</li><li>Breakthrough innovations that change the paradigm and shift the basis of competition. </li></ol>

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.

Encourage communication and alignment across your organization with strategic planning

<ul><li>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</li><li>“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</li><li>“Open innovation” lets you outsource certain aspects of innovation</li><li>“Product and technology road maps” help you communicate your innovation options to your customers</li></ul>

Use innovation tools to keep innovation moving from idea to market

“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.

Innovate by tapping into your customers’ emotions

To do this, make sure you identify, develop and work with the serial innovators in your business:<ul><li>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</li><li>They work tenaciously on projects and delve deeply into the customer’s point of view and needs</li><li>They keep in mind that they need to bring ideas to market.</li><li>They see the value in other people and enlist their strengths in the pursuit of their goals</li><li>They work non-linearly: Innovators are always ready to backtrack and reconsider earlier steps</li></ul>

The “who” of innovation is as important as the “how.”

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

Organizational Alignment

“At the extreme, renewal by way of breakthrough innovation redefines the nature of competition.”“Innovation is all about increasing the net present value of your business. If you are serious about financial and operational sustainability, the argument that it reduces profits does not hold.”

Innovation seems too expensive until someone else has a breakthrough

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.

<ul><li>Innovation seems too expensive until someone else has a breakthrough.</li><li>Design thinking gives you a reliable, low-cost and low-risk way to start innovating.</li><li>Innovate by tapping into your customers’ emotions.</li><li>Use innovation tools to keep innovation moving from idea to market.</li><li>The “who” of innovation is as important as the “how.”</li><li>Encourage communication and alignment across your organization with strategic planning.</li></ul>

No-Excuses Innovation

Strategies for Small and Medium-Sized Mature Enterprises

The case for innovation and a clear, targeted strategy for planning and implementation that will help small- and medium-sized mature enterprises (SMMEs) thrive through reinvention and renewal. In contrast to large companies, SMMEs are on their own to win or lose in the marketplace. They may lack the relative economies of scale and scope, available to large companies, to understand and invest in innovation. Often they are in a position of sustained disadvantage with no perceived path of renewal. As SMMEs approach maturity, it is common for them to choose to only maintain what they believe to be the safety of maturity attained rather than to opt for a strategy that also includes constant reinvention and renewal. But as Bruce A. Vojak and Walter B. Herbst argue, this path of seemingly least risk and least resistance can be the most detrimental to the company in the long run. The real risk is to not innovate. No-Excuses Innovation makes the case to owners, advisors, executives, and leaders—as well as those in the trenches—of the value of innovation: why it's worthy of investment and what it can do for the health and longevity of a company. This book also details how innovation, and thus reinvention and renewal, can be most effectively and efficiently implemented. With case studies and narrative examples drawn from their time in industry and the academy, the authors present a valuable strategy guide specific to SMMEs and to one of the biggest existential dilemmas they encounter.