Profiting from Innovation While Balancing Risk

Over the years, we’ve had the good fortune of serving customers who believed that true innovation most often happens when they take the road less traveled.

This almost always involves the following:

• Questioning the market status quo
• Recognizing that some competitor or market force has moved the proverbial corporate cheese
• Harnessing creative forces inside and outside the enterprise to find new market strategies and paradigms that can be embraced by employees, channel partners and ultimately consumers
• Knowing how to bring innovations to market which are not saddled or killed off by corporate overhead

How do we accomplish this? 

• Align innovation with corporate strategy. Here at Axiom, we have a tool called the Product Innovation Charter (PIC) that does this in a single page.
• Provide rationale for the innovation. Typically, we use market research and analysis to accomplish this. Voice of Customer (VOC) data and big data are two key tools. We integrate localized VOC with big data from the federal government that we can model down to specific zip codes.
• Create demand and profitability forecasts for the innovation. A primary part of our scenario planning is to model “what happens if our customer doesn’t do this” and other “what ifs”. We often use a market gaming method pioneered by Professor Robert Blattberg, one of my favorite professors at the Kellogg School of Management.
• Provide process or method templates that our customers can take and customize for their organization and channel partners.
• Package the above with appropriate internal communications so everyone is on the same page.

The end goals?

• Mitigate risk with good data and process.
• Combat uncertainty with fact-based data.
• Foster organizational trust

For more information about our innovation tools and case studies, visit www.axiomcom.com.