Voice of the Emergent Customer

by Drew Boyd

Are some customers better than others at developing new concepts? Professor Donna L. Hoffman at the University of California Riverside thinks so. Emergent customers have a unique ability to "wrap their head" around a new concept and improve it. She created a scale to identify them so companies hear the voice of the 'right' customer during new product development.

Emergent customers are better at imagining how concepts address latent unmet needs. Dr. Hoffman describes it as a "unique constellation of personality traits and processing abilities that enables such consumers to engage in a synergistic process of visualization and rationalization to improve product concepts." Those characteristics are:

• Openness to new experiences
  
• Reflection
  
• Experiential and rational processing style
  
• Verbal (rational style) and Visual (experiential style)
  
• Creativity (self perceived)
  
• Creative personality
  
• Optimism

The study included 1,124 respondents and compared performance of those identified as emergent customers against those of lead users, early adopters, and a control group. The emergent customers significantly outperformed the other groups.

How would you put this to use?

• Market research firms could use the scale to screen research candidates. Emergent customers focus on improving concepts, while 'non-emergent' customers judge marketplace acceptance.


• Companies could learn about their emergent customer's behaviors and beliefs. Do they buy more, use more, or pay more for certain products? Do they use products in a different way? Do they influence other customers?


• Companies could set up advisory panels of emergent customers to watch for opportunities and threats.

How would emergent customers perform using a structured innovation method? It is tempting to assume they would do better using methods like S.I.T. These people are more motivated and optimistic. They are more hopeful about the output of innovation workshops and are likely to push harder. Star performers "Google" their mind to make innovative connections and associations in rapid fire fashion. This relates to Dr. Hoffman's factor of "experiential and rational processing style."

For innovation workshops, my 'dream team' would include a mix of emergent and non-emergent participants. Perhaps the ideal scenario is pairing them together. As the emergent thinker pushes ideas into new territory, the non-emergent thinker can offer quick feedback. Innovation is a team sport after all.

Researchers have long noted that the "voice of the mainstream customer" is not that useful in developing new products. Instead, finding the 'Voice of the Emergent Customer' could be a new source of competitive advantage.


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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Mapping Customer Experience Excellence

10 Steps to Customer Journey Mapping

by Arne van Oosterom

When the nice people at MyCustomer.com asked me to write an article about customer journey mapping, I knew right where to begin.

A product or service is merely a means to an end. The real deeper value lies in the story attached. I don't want to own a coffee maker - I need to wake up early with a little help from a cup of coffee. I don't want to use a train - I want to get home to my wife and children. I don't want to go to a store and buy a stereo set - I just want to listen to my favorite rock music when I'm home, it makes me unwind after work.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not capable of listening to stories. And this is why the gap between "inside and outside" has grown too wide. To stay competitive and survive the changes organizations are presently facing, they need to reassess the way they are structured, function and build relationships with customers. Closing the "reality gap" between organizations and people (employees and customers alike) should be the number one priority. And for this we need a new set of skills, methods and tools.

People-centered approaches like Design Thinking, Social Design and Service Design have emerged because it provides us with useful methods and tools to bridge the gap. One of the tools is customer journey mapping. And in this article I'll explain what customer journey mapping is, and how it is used to improve quality and foster a culture of innovation. But first I'll explain why tools like customer journey mapping emerged and are needed.

I like the description given to it in an article by Kable:


"CJM maps the route people take as they interact with services, taking quantitative measures such as number of contacts made and the time taken to access a service. What distinguishes it from data that might be gleaned from customer relationship management systems is its equal focus on emotional insights about the citizen's experience. The goal is to mix quantitative approaches with qualitative, experiential data, providing a dispassionate analysis of the issues."


Change Causes Friction

Thinking in journeys can be very helpful. Change is a constant. And thinking in journeys takes this into account and puts more emphasis on quality of the whole experience. Dwight Eisenhower said it like this: "planning is everything, the plan is nothing."

Only those who are adaptable survive. That's just one of those inconvenient evolutionary things. But generally speaking, companies and governmental organizations are not designed for adaptability. They are organized in static, pyramid shaped, top-down-broadcasting models and not organized to receive feedback from the outside or the bottom of the pyramid or to use this information for change and continuous improvement. Most organizations are incapable of having real and meaningful (two-way-street) conversations with their customers.

And it's exactly in this area where the biggest business opportunities lie. We need to design and implement systems that will allow our organizations to have meaningful and ongoing conversations with our customers, using the insight we gain to improve and innovate in an ongoing iteration. And this all starts by taking a good look at the organization from the outside. There are no magic tricks. But it's just common sense to start with the people you work with and your customers.

Customer journey mapping builds a mirror and enables us to question why we do the things we do. It makes things visible, which might have been right in front of us, but were so familiar we did not notice them or question them. It never occurred to us we could change them. It brings knowledge, already embedded in the organization, to the surface and makes explicit what is implicitly already there.

It allows us to take a step back from where we are, away from our internal targets and agendas and lets us be open-minded and put our creative energy to good use. And the beauty of it: there is no lengthy report, which no one actually reads. Customer journey mapping is a creative tool and works with visualizations. It is meant to inspire, energize and kick-start good conversations and ideation. And it's the conversation that matters - and the opinions and ideas it brings to the surface.


Building a Culture of Trust

Customer journey mapping is primarily used as a tool to investigate, analyze and improve customer experiences. However there is another more profound use of the customer journey. DesignThinkers, for instance, has developed a system called the Customer Journey LAB.

The Customer Journey LAB is used to facilitate an ongoing conversation within the organization and build or strengthen a culture of mutual trust. The LAB is embedded into the internal workings of an organization. It's a "short iterative feedback loop" and allows for top-down and bottom-up conversations. It's facilitated by an online LAB and offline media and events.

The Customer Journey LAB is an iterative method to build a culture of trust and adaptability, which is the most important step into building a relationship with your customer and maintain a strong, long term, almost irreplaceable competitive edge.


A quick guide to customer journey mapping

This allows us to step into the customer shoes. It shows us the customer's perceptions and the larger context in which we play a part. It lets us be emerged in their world, their reality. Get a deeper insight into customer needs, perception, experience and motivation. It will answer questions like: What are people really trying to achieve? How are they trying to achieve this? What do they use and in what order? Why do they make a choice? What are they experiencing, feeling, while trying to reach the desired outcome?

A customer journey map is built up layer by layer. We start 'above water', with the customer and slowly dive deeper and deeper into the organizational structures and context. The tool can be used with customers or management, employees and other stakeholder or, even better, in a mix.

A customer journey map (e.g. used by front-office employees) in its simplest form will contain the following:

1. Context or stakeholder map. We list all stakeholders and we order the hierarchy in circles of influences around the centre, where you are. When working with customers you'll have the customer in the centre. Describe all relationships on the map by answering the question: what do we do for them; what do they do for us? This map shows you the landscape or force field you are dealing with. And you can discuss how this influences the quality of your work and how a customer benefits or suffers from it.


2. Persona. We need a rich customer profile or persona. Describe his/her personal and business situation now (present situation) and in the future (ambitions).


3. Outcomes. A description of his/ her desired outcome - what is he/she trying to achieve?


4. Customer journey. We list all actions (as far as possible) the customer has to take to reach the outcome (placed in a horizontal line). Don't start listing actions when the customer uses your service the first time. Start before the moment he/she decided to use your product or service. This way we visualise behavioural patterns.


5. Touchpoints. Underneath every action we list all channels and touchpoints services the customer encounter. Not just yours! This way you'll discover the landscape you are in form the customer's perception.


6. Moments of truth. Then we identify the moments the customer encounters your touchpoints and channels. We start focus on those (you can move them down a bit). Identify the most important 'moments of truth'.


7. Service delivery. Underneath every touch point, we write down who delivers the service. Who is directly responsible for it (e.g. front office personal)?


8. Emotional journey. Then give every vertical line a grade for the experience (Actions -> touch point -> who delivers the service -> grade). Don't grade the functionality, grade the work. For the emotion, how do you think the customer felt at that moment? Use a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the better the experience. This can be visualised (e.g. by a line going up and down), and is very effective as a conversation starter. It can often be a real eye-opener.


9. Blueprint. Now, to make a long story a bit shorter, we can go on listing the organisation underneath, writing down who supports the people delivering the service (backoffice), and in turn who influences the back office (we link back to the stakeholders map), until we have a complete organisational blueprint, a complete picture of the working of an organisation and emotional journey, from the outside in.


10. Improve and innovate. Use creative, brainstorming and any other ideation techniques for the service opportunities you identified (low grades) and/or design complete new and ideal journeys or services. This usually is the moment people have the most fun. I have been surprised many times by the talent and eagerness of people to engage in this creative process. People are usual a lot more creative than you think. We just need to put them in the right situation and mood.

Don't wait until the end to collect ideas. Write down all ideas and insights during the building of the customer journeys. These insights will be a rich source for improvements and innovative ideas. And all you need to start are some large sheets of paper, markers and a lot of sticky-notes.

We will shortly be publishing all the materials for building your own Customer Journey LAB and all the material will be downloadable with a guidebook from the DesignThinkers website.


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Arne van Oosterom is lecturer at various International institutions, owner at DesignThinkers Amsterdam, founder of WENOVSKI and Chairman of the Service Design Network Netherlands.

A Simple Model for Innovation

by Thomas Petersen

Finding the next big thing is probably one of the biggest challenges in the world of startups. Countless companies, entrepreneurs and VC's spend a considerable amount of time plus money figuring out where and what to invest in. Yet often the game changers seem to be coming out of nothing and from unexpected areas. Is it luck or do those who change the world know something we don't?

In my last post I talked about some principles that can be used to design better digital products. In this post I will look at a model to map and explore what different kind of product you should do.

Most of the businesses spawned in the first bubble, where based on the belief that taking any business from the physical world and putting it online was enough to be successful. Any assessment regarding logistics, economy of scale, or competition with offline brands, was naively optimistic if not absent. A lot have changed since then.

It's easy to be a wisecrack in retrospect. There is no shortage of expert analysis for why something became a success after the fact. It's much harder to know what products or services will become a success before they hit mainstream. Yet some people seem to be doing just that. Do they know something that we don't or are they just plain lucky?

Even though luck does have something to do with it (timing?) it's not all just random. As a matter of fact there are some very good models to help you better understand the art of innovating. Some of them complex others rather simple. The one I find most useful is this two-way matrix which covers four different types of innovation.


Exploring opportunity by mapping your idea on this matrix.



Do what others do, but do it better.

This is the most popular category to invent within. The basic premise is to create something that outperforms either on price, features, ease-of-use or performance. For instance: Sony Ericsson and Nokia competing on features or MS Office and Sun StarOffice competing on price (Free vs. expensive) This category is the easiest (on paper) to compete in, but also the category with the fiercest competition. With the introduction of the free price-tag this haven't gotten easier

Advice: Be better by being different. Think about how your product solves the jobs that your customers are trying to get done with your product, rather than simply thinking about what jobs you are solving. See what Steepster did for tea-connoisseurs


Do what others do, but do more.

This category is a little bit trickier. The basic idea here is to create an ecosystem for your product or service. The category takes advantage of easing the usage of a given product or service on different platforms.

Take the iPod as an example. You don't only get a music player. You also get the software to create play-lists plus access to buy music. Recently with the introduction of the iPhone and the AppStore this have created an even stronger ecosystem.

Another example is HP digital cameras, HP Snapfish for online picture storage and HP Snapfish print service that allow you to create albums with your own pictures and get them printed.

For a pure digital ecosystem Google is a good example. Google Search, AdWords and Google Analytics.

This category often has some "hero" product (the iPod, Google search, or the HP Camera) and often with a mixture of hardware and software and services.

From a company point of view this is often called vertical integration. Simplified meaning that a given company, own all the parts of the production that are needed to deliver to their customers.

The challenge with this category is that it often requires a successful product to build the ecosystem around. For a startup this is a difficult area to deliver in.

Advice: But even though you often do need a hero product, there are ways around it. Create an API that allows others to interfaces with your product. Then they will help you build your ecosystem. You won't necessarily have complete control (vertical integration) but you will become an important part of it.

37 signals API, FaceBook API and Google API all provide opportunity for interfacing with their products.


Do what others do, but for a new audience.

This is the most interesting type of innovation IMHO. Basically you are trying to find non-consumers and turn them into consumers by either making the product affordable or by making the product less specialized so that non-experts can use it.

An example on the latter is WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver from Adobe. Mint.com took the idea of managing your own money to a new level allowing people without financial skills to suddenly understand their money in a different light. SalesForce.com basically created a SAP like product and broke it into pieces thus allowing access to the power of data-warehousing without the price that normally comes with it.

Leasing is an example on the former with its different financial plans are used to give non-consumers access to products they couldn't originally afford. The subsidizing that comes with most cell-phones is also an example of giving non-consumers access to your products.

Sometimes technologies that have previously been available for government or the scientific community find its way to the consumer market. It is interesting that rarely the original usage of the technology that ends up being the way consumers use it.

The very Internet we are using right now is an obvious example. GPS is another, both originally military systems.

But perhaps the best example is in the mobile industry with SMS (Texting if you're from the US).

Originally used by technicians to send test messages around the network. Then mobile customers began sending messages between each other. Later someone figured out a way to turn the SMS messages into commands that a server would understand (Look at any reality show). Then banks started using SMS for mobile banking (Large parts of Africans access their banks primarily through their cell-phone). Lately I have been buying ferry tickets with my cell. Ring-tones can be purchased through SMS. And last but by no means least, Twitter turned SMS into a broadcasting service.

Basically this approach to innovation is ripe with possibilities. Either a market has been proven (HTML editors, accounting, car markets and housing market) or an infrastructure is in place (Internet, GPS, Mobile net, Fiber).

This means that a lot of the hard work has been done already and you can focus on exploring different alternative uses of these to turn non-consumers into consumers.

Advice: Look around you and find areas that are served by only one type of customers and see if you can make that product available for what what previously non-consumers. As an example wordy.com to quote: "Let professional copy-editors check your text for grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure". Looking at the amount of typos, spelling and grammar mistakes, I normally do, be sure to sign me up when it's available!


Do what no other is doing

This is normally considered to be the holy grail of businesses innovation. Inventing something new that does not exist on the market already.

Classic example would be the light bulb, the car, the computer, the telephone. But also many types of software and services such as the OS and the spreadsheet. The innovations either create a demand or tap into jobs people are already trying to accomplish but with arbitrary tools.

It's hard to find something new, but not impossible.

By using the 2way matrix you can start to think more methodically about your startup. It won't guarantee success but it will help you gain a better understanding of your products and thus allow you to better explore different approaches to become a success.

To dig deeper and get a firmer understanding of innovation without the marketing hype I suggest you read some of the work from Clayton C. Christensen, Tony Ulwick or Peter F. Druckert.

And remember. The art of innovation is not just about finding something completely new but as much to connect two known areas in new ways.


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Thomas Petersen is the co-founder of hello, a digital creative agency that designs and develops products and services. He writes on Black&White^TM and on twitter @hello_world.

Solid Service Principles are Crucial

by Damian Kernahan

Below is the latest blog I just received from Seth Godin. He (as he does most days) makes an important point especially for Service based companies and provides additional reasons why Service Design can be such a potent weapon for progressive companies.

It's not JUST the steak or the phone call or the insurance cover that your customers are buying when they look to buy something from you. It's not JUST the all the elements that make up the customer journey and everything within it. The touch-points that deliver it, the spaces where engagement with customers occurs through channels such as in-store, call centre, postal mail, or online. The 'moment' within each touch-point where there is an interaction and your staff or systems engage with your customers.

These are all crucially important and without it, your business will not thrive and grow new and recurring revenue streams. But how do you handle situations when the unexpected happens. When there is no script, no exact procedure?

We have been working with a large Australian based firm recently who is acknowledged as a great Service Innovator and relative to their peers, they are head and shoulders above in terms of customer experience and growth. However they also know that their competitors are quickly imitating them in marketing, minimising the perceived gap. It's time to leap ahead again with a sustainable differentiator.

Having developed deep insight through design research methods we have developed innovative human centered Customer Journey Maps, an Experience Strategy and undertaken Intention Engineering.

However you cant stop there. On top of that we have developed the mortar that holds all those bricks together. It's a set of Service Principles that allow their team to take the right decisions each and every day when there is no touchpoint, no planned interaction. It provides an important guide, a set or principles on how to act to remain customer focused even when no-one is looking and no one is listening. It fills in all those 'in between moments' that all add up to the delivery of an exceptional customer experience and transformed loyalty and profitability for companies.

As is quite often the case, the ideas are the relatively easy part, the real expertise comes in how you hang it all together and make it work in a repeatable, sustainable manner making it work within your clients organisational systems and infrastructure. That is our singular goal here at Proto Partners and should also be for each and every Service Design firm.


Seth's blog entry is below

Scott McCloud's classic book on comics explains a lot more than comics.

A key part of his thesis is that comic books work because the action takes place between the frames. Our imagination fills in the gaps between what happened in that frame and this frame, which means that we're as much involved as the illustrator and author are in telling the story.

Marketing, it turns out, works precisely the same way.

Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad... but the consumer's take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.

Marketing is what happens when you're not trying, when you're being transparent and when there's no script in place.

It's not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It's marketing when your people don't respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It's not marketing when I use your product as intended. It's marketing when my friend and I are talking about how the thing we bought from you changed us.

It's not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It's marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.

Consumers are too smart for the frames. It's the in-between frame stuff that matters. And yet marketers spend 103% of our time on the frames.


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Damian Kernahan is the managing partner of corporate growth consultants, Proto Partners, www.protopartners.com.au.

Innovating Healthcare

by Rowan Gibson

The first modern hospitals were founded in Europe and America in the 18th century. About a hundred years later, both the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry began to emerge. So it's safe to say that, in much of the developed world, the healthcare business has been around for about two or three centuries. And, over time, like most other businesses, it has become bigger, better and faster. But has it actually become different in any essential ways? Not really. Yet that's about to change. In a world of hyper-accelerating change, global competition, rapidly commoditized products and services, and unprecedented patient primacy, the industry is waking up to the need to reinvent itself from top to bottom for a whole new era.

Over the last few years, I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time with healthcare people. Not because I'm sick (thankfully!). But because there's a growing recognition right across the industry that the strategies and business models of the last couple of centuries may no longer be fit for purpose. The world is simply changing so much, and so quickly, that the old ways of doing things (and they are very old) are looking increasingly archaic, perhaps even obsolete.

As regular readers of this column will know, my approach to radical rethinking and renewal is centered on a set of strategy tools called the "Four Lenses of Innovation". Briefly, they are: challenging orthodoxies, harnessing trends, leveraging resources in new ways, and addressing unmet customer needs. And if we look at what is happening in the healthcare industry around the globe, we can see numerous and very exciting examples of these four "lenses" in action. Here are just a few.

One of the stubbornly enduring orthodoxies in hospital management is the age-old notion that we all make mistakes - "to err is human". Everyone has heard horror stories of people having the wrong leg amputated, or getting an operation that was meant for the patient next door. Every year in the U.S., for example, millions of hospital patients suffer injuries - about 100,000 of them fatal! - from things like false medication, incorrect dosage, inefficient diagnostics, duplicated procedures, and so forth. Yet in healthcare, people have long accepted these medical errors as "part of the system". This is clearly an orthodoxy that must be challenged. When IBM took a good look at what was going wrong - and all too often it was stupid things like illegible handwriting, misplaced decimal points, missed drug interactions and allergies - they realized they could alleviate the problem. They offered to use IT to help hospitals manage their patient data a lot more effectively, in much the same way that companies manage their supply chains. This was the birth of IBM Life Sciences, which has grown from a 2-person unit in 2000 to a multi-billion dollar, 1500-employee business today.

Consider another orthodoxy - this time in the pharmaceutical industry. The traditional pharma model is based on drug discovery - testing thousands of compounds to see if any of them makes a measurable difference. It's a model that has essentially remained unchanged since the industry got started in the 19th century - the only difference being the scale and efficiency with which today's pharma companies can manage the compound-testing process. Today, however, a new set of players has emerged - companies like Amgen, Genentech, and Genzyme - where the business model is focused on understanding disease mechanisms (i.e., genetic diseases, immune system disorders, heart disease, cancer) and creating targeted products that address those mechanisms. Their promise is 'personalized medicine', in which the therapy can be matched to an individual's own unique genetic makeup, as opposed to big pharma's "mass medicine" model. By innovating around gene-based therapy, which is based on completely different skills and assets from conventional drug-making, this new breed of pharma companies is fundamentally changing the game. Which explains why Swiss pharma giant Roche was recently so focused on swallowing up biotech pioneer Genentech.

Now think about trends. Look at what's happening in the technology field alone - from e-health to handheld scanners, mobile information devices, telemedicine, surgical robots, remote diagnostics, "integrated digital hospitals", 24/7 access to full medical records, and the list goes on. Or consider the parallel trend "from high tech to high-touch", where design elements such as nature, color, lighting, noise reduction, and so forth, are being used by a few cutting-edge hospitals to promote what is known as a "healing environment" that treats both body and soul.

Then there are healthcare providers that leverage their resources in novel ways to create new value for customers. India's Apollo Hospital Group, for example, which is the largest healthcare provider in Asia, and the third largest in the world, uses its expertise to offer medical business process outsourcing - i.e. writing of diagnosis reports, medical coding, billing etc. - to hospitals right across America. And for many of these hospitals, Apollo take cares of radiology, X-rays, ultrasound, CTs and MRIs when it's nighttime in the U.S., taking advantage of the time difference. The company's IT-enabled services already generate tens of billions of dollars.

And what about unmet customer needs? Again, there are great examples. Like Florida Hospital, where staff did "day in the life" profiling of patients so they could better understand and address their problems and frustrations. Or California's Fresno Surgical Hospital, which has modeled itself on the Ritz Carlton hotel to offer a '5-star patient experience' - including luxury rooms, mini-bars, art on the walls, and food prepared by a Ritz-Carlton chef.

True, many of these examples are still about improving what has always been done. But as all this exciting innovation activity continues, I believe we'll soon see the healthcare industry doing things it has never done before.

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

Are you crimping your innovation funnel?

New Product Development Requires Fresh Perspective on 'Creative' and 'Structure'

by Robert F. Brands

New product development can be a misunderstood concept.

Is the "product" actually a product? Or can it be a process? Is it a mandate from the C Suite? Or can it be a suggestion from the factory floor, the retail showroom, the Idea Box or a customer tip?

How wide is your idea funnel? And how do you treat ideas once they land in the organization's "idea hopper"? (see the blog post on "Innovation and Idea Management" to discover how to handle in-bound ideas).

Answer these questions, and you've placed your finger on the pulse of how your organization embraces new product development (NPD).

NPD best blossoms in that place where creativity commingles with structure - where fresh thinking is fostered in a nursery of structured liberation. Think of ideas as if they were offspring: They should be free to roam and explore, but they need fences - structure - in their lives to ensure safe maturation in a controlled environment.

The same is true for NPD - regardless of whether products are widgets for sale or processes envisioned to improve the organization. For the concepts of "creative" and "structured" are not mutually exclusive. Creativity is the thinking that goes behind the ideation of a new product. Structure helps define and determine the vetting process that NPD must go through.

Keep in mind that each step of this entire process has distinct "sub-steps," if you will, that must be accomplished even before a Go/No-Go decision can be made. These often are done together - and simultaneously. This vetting and completed steps will than determine which products pass the Go/No-Go decision - regardless of the source or even the potential "profitability" of any new product.

These are important distinctions. When creating a foundational NPD process, all ideas should be welcomed from all sources - from the customer service rep to the C-level exec. No short-shrift or free pass here. If the structured vetting process, one established by the Chief Idea Officer and his/her team, gives a Thumbs-Down to a new idea, the source should not spin that determination.

Regardless of whether a product is seen as a revenue source, or just an internal concept or process, that, too, should have little impact on a product's viability or survivability in the organization. Good "products" don't have to result in revenues; they can enhance processes, that in turn, can boost profitability.

As you're pondering your NPD capabilities, consider whether your pipeline accommodate simultaneous multiple product development streams? A new, physical product for sale should not force a process-focused product to be shelved. This level of scalability ensures a wide "innovation highway" - one that is lean, adaptive and flexible, and can handle various products at the same time.

Finally, is your organization prepared to measure the results - not of the new product, but of the process itself? Do you have a system in place to gather, measure and share both the success and the stumbling blocks? Are you prepared to ask yourself, how did the process work?

The truth is, future success can be closely tied into past accomplishments - if you're willing to ask the right questions, create the right environment, and learn along the way.

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Robert F. Brands is President and founder of Brands & Company, LLC. Innovation Coach Robert Brands has launched a new site - www.RobertsRulesOfInnovation.com - to complement his upcoming book.