Strategic innovationEvolving innovative thinking by focusing on future users

Jon SundboRoskilde University

Denmark

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Basis for the comments

Case studies of service and experience firms Experiments in service and experience firms

(project ”When the customer encounters the employee”)

General reflections and case-examples

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Why strategic innovation

Innovation is a risky business The idea phase not the most difficult – that is the

commercialisation phase Firms want to introduce innovations that the market

wants Service firms have very little R&D and need to be

pull-oriented They have the advantage of meeting the customers Their innovation process becomes customer

oriented

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What is strategic innovation ?

Innovation is about what people may want in the future

That is difficult to predict

Firms can not rely on actual user-demands on the market – they can not find lead users

Firms are forced to choose a strategy:– Defensive: Try to guess what future users will want– Offensive: Try to determine what the future users will

want (influencing life style)

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How is strategic innovation practiced?

It is difficult to practice directly user-based innovation:

Customers often have no ideas, particularly not for radical innovations

Strategic innovation is the indirect way to find what users may want in the future

Several methods

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User analyses

Market analysesExamples: Surveys (how do people use web sites)

Trend spotters (new food habits)Focus groups (social home service)

Anthropological approachExamples: Living in youth groups (music, clothes, everything) – acting as a tourist

Critical incidencesExample: Interviews with victims of fire

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User involvement

User communities

Examples: Web-blogs (software firms, library)

Help desk and complaints (travel agency) User involvement in the innovation process

Examples: Co-creation (NewInsight) –

The idea and test phases (New services for mobile phones)

Value chain innovation (company-users as experts)

Examples: Diary – wholesale – cafe

Hotel - attraction – tour operator – press

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Employee-based user-knowledge

Idea boxesExamples: Library, IBM, Venture Cup

Empathic innovationExamples: Waiters in a cafe

Insurance agents Employees as innovators

Example: TrygVesta (insurance company) Volunteers

Example: Roskilde festival

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Offensive strategy

Creating behavioral trajectory

Example: Discount airlines discount airport terminals

Experience added (influencing life style)

Examples: Cars – web pages – Levis jeans Entrepreneurship – create the movement oneself

Examples: Body Shop – Windmill industry

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Reflexive strategy

The strategy must be regularly assessed (the innovations may be wrong - the world is changing)

Employees are involved (encounter ther customers)

New push-based innovations may come up (technology, R&D, intrapreneurship)

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Sum up

Market or user based strategic innovation is about incremental innovation

Strategic innovation is constant hard work It is about business development and solving

problems/creating a better life – call it innovation or not

The methods must be developed and people trained in using them.Management must be committed and focused on innovation – and educatede.g. Project ”When the customer encounters the employee”