Good questions further careers, says Scott Anthony, managing partner of the innovation and growth consulting firm Innosight (innosight.com). Innovators ask a lot of questions, like Peter Drucker’s, “If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?” And Ted Levitt’s, “What business are we really in?”
Anthony recently shared some questions for corporate innovators with Harvard Business Review (hbr.org). These kinds of questions “crystalize the entire innovation process from beginning to end by improving your ability to spot new growth opportunities, pinpoint disruptive threats, shape compelling offerings and commercialize your ideas.”
Questions to identify new growth opportunities
• What problem is the customer struggling to solve? Steve Jobs said it is not the customer’s job to know what he wants. Anthony agrees. It is the innovator’s job. One of the clearest signs of an opportunity for innovation is someone demonstrating that a problem is important by spending her time or money trying to solve it and expressing frustration (either vocally or visibly) because existing solutions fall short.
• Which customers can’t participate in a market because they lack skills, wealth or convenient access to existing solutions? A time-
tested path to disruptive growth is to compete not against fierce competitors, but against what we call nonconsumption. Making it simpler, easier and more affordable for people to do what they historically have been trying to do is a great way to create growth. Doing so for people who are locked out of a market is what made companies like eBay, Google and Southwest Airlines the powerhouses they are today.
Questions to identify the threat of disruption
• Where are we overshooting the market by providing features that users don’t care about and don’t want to pay for? One of the central tenets of disruptive innovation is that companies innovate faster than people’s needs change. People will always take better products, but when they can’t use or don’t want to pay for the premium features, it creates opportunities for simpler, cheaper solutions.
• If you were going to disrupt your company, how would you do it? Despite the fact that the concept has been in the public domain for close
to 20 years, disruption still seems to blindside far too many companies. What is particularly punishing is that the disruptors are almost always in plain sight but tend to be discounted by the market leaders.
A question to design compelling offerings
• What can you do that few other companies in the world can do? The ferocious pace of entrepreneurial-ism makes it increasingly difficult for companies to innovate at the same speed as the market in which they participate. Speed alone is insufficient. Companies should seek to innovate better than the market in which they participate — by taking advantage of a trusted brand, unique access to a distribution channel, or proprietary technological know-how. Zeroing in on what makes you unique maximizes the chances of creating a powerful and compelling offering.
A question to commercialize your idea
• How can you learn more affordably and efficiently? Experiments need not be complicated and expensive. A phone call to an expert can shine light on a critical operational assumption. Showing customers a rough mockup of an idea can give you an early read on their interest. Making some effort to seek simple and resource-effective ways to learn may make the difference between successfully getting to market and running out of money before you ever do.
“Don’t just do something, stand there” is a phrase that young medical students might hear to remind them that sometimes doing nothing (immediately) is the best course of action. “The rush to take action before a root cause of a symptom is clear can cause more harm than good,” Anthony states. “While innovation should no doubt be pursued actively, taking the time to consider these and related questions can be a great way to focus activities and tilt the odds of success in your favor.”
Scott Anthony’s most recent book is “The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market.” You can follow him on Twitter at @ScottDAnthony.
