Innovation Process Archives

Amazon’s unique approach to innovation helps teams “work backwards” to create breakthroughs

The best business strategies focus on meeting and exceeding customer needs and expectations. This means envisioning customer problems as well as ideal solutions to those problems before actually developing a product or service–and this is exactly how Amazon innovates.

Amazon’s secret to innovation is the focus of a new book, Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, two former Amazon executives who started working in the company in the late 1990s. As noted in the book, Amazon’s “working backwards” process includes four steps:

Step 1: Define the customer problem or pain point

Start by determining what the customer problem is that you’re trying to solve. If you don’t know what that customer problem is, then you won’t be able to build a meaningful solution. Identify customer pains that are not going away and are persistent and repetitive, like how many aggravating clicks it takes to purchase a product.

Remember that if you have a clear idea of the problem you are trying to solve, you will be better able to develop a working prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) quickly. If you focus on the wrong problem, the product won’t be viable when it reaches the masses.

Step 2: Define the ideal product solution

After defining the right customer pain point and problem, brainstorm and describe the ideal solution or product that will help. Remember that the right solution may require bringing on new staff members or individuals with different skill sets and ideas. Don’t allow this to be a barrier or a constraint; rather, look at it as an opportunity to grow your business more quickly.

Focus on what would be the ideal product solution from your customer’s point of view and then act on that. The book shares that this is the same way that Amazon developed Amazon Web Services (AWS), by engaging and empathizing with target customers more closely and helping to establish entirely new business categories that didn’t exist before.

Step 3: Work backwards from the ideal customer experience

In this step, you assess and define the ideal customer experience, and then identify challenges or issues associated with making your new product or service a reality that achieves the experience. During this stage, it is very important to be as detailed as possible to identify the technical, financial, legal, partnership, and other hurdles you’ll have to overcome to bring this ideal product to life.

Step 4: Refine and repeat previous steps

Continue to iterate and operate using “sprints” that focus on short-term milestones. The perfect product, service, or customer experience usually doesn’t occur on the first try. As the authors wrote, all of Amazon’s most successful products required iteration over the course of many months, and sometimes years.

Most of us have heard about the age-old idea that we should “start with the end in mind.” That’s exactly what working backwards is all about. But it’s also more than that. Yes, you need a vision of what you want to achieve. But you also need the tactical tools and approaches to get you there. When you focus on the customer in everything you do, innovation moves from an ambiguous concept into a concrete way to change the world.

Feature Image Credit: Photo: Getty Images. Illustration: Inc. Magazine

By Soren Kaplan

Sourced from Inc.

By Lisa Bodell.

In a survey from Boston Consulting Group, 79% of executives ranked innovation as a top-three priority for their company. And yet, research suggests that most professionals are unclear about how to bring an innovative idea from concept to market. After more than 20 years in the innovation space, I’ve found that the process can be distilled into five distinct phases.

The first is often called idea development. This is when you gather raw ideas from sources like brainstorms, customer feedback, employee submission portals, etc.

Next is the concept development phase. Here is where you or your innovation team roughly expands the most promising raw ideas into concepts. By “rough expansion,” I mean that spending five minutes on a concept is too little time but investing five hours is too much. Through trial and error, you’ll determine the right amount of time for your organization to spend on this early phase.

During this phase, you’ll determine which ideas are aligned with your business strategy and you’ll apply any other criteria that your org uses to screen ideas.

The focus of your third phase is business development. Now is when you’ll build out the concepts that made it through Phase Two. That means researching and outlining customer requirements; market and revenue potential; competitive analysis; risks; feasibility; and design and patent considerations.

Phase Four is when technical development happens. This refers to design; features and functions; experimentation; prototyping; testing and feed-backing; manufacturing; and so forth.

Today In: Leadership

Your final innovation stage is market development. This is typically when final refinements are made and when your marketing team creates the product or service strategy. That includes the positioning, U.S.P., target markets, sales channels, pricing and more for your new innovation.

The process I’ve outlined has five phases, but other innovators use as few as three and as many as eight. Feel free to customize the structure according to your needs after you’ve utilized it a few times. For now, use it to navigate the innovation process — from the lightbulb moment to launch day.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstoock Start by gathering raw ideas from brainstorms, customer feedback, employee submission portals, and other sources.

By Lisa Bodell

I’m obsessed with simplification as a work and life hack. As founder and CEO of FutureThink in NYC, I’ve helped people at Google, Novartis and Accenture kill complexity and create space for innovation. When I’m not delivering a keynote or TedX talk somewhere in the world, I’m writing books (Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins) or reading them. I’m a board adviser for the Association of Professional Futurists, council member of the World Economic Forum and a carpooling mom of two. I’ve taught innovation and creativity at both American and Fordham Universities, and the North Pole is on my bucket list because it’s where every time zone converges.