Excerpt from Transformative

Although incumbent organizations embrace technological innovation faster than ever to thwart the efforts of their competitors, the confidence bubble presents a barrier to achieving lasting results because of three critical errors. Each precludes companies from identifying more broad-based opportunities to create truly transformative change. The first error is leaders’ failure to focus their innovation effort on defining and creating new and better customer outcomes. The second fatal error of the confidence bubble is an innovation paradox: presuming that technology innovation improves a company’s differentiated advantage when it may often actually lower it. Finally, the third and most damaging critical error of the confidence bubble is how companies limit themselves in finding and acquiring other ways to innovate and create value in a unique and sustainable way.
 
It’s no surprise then that 85 percent of CEOs are dissatisfied with how effective their organization is at achieving new innovation in the first place. Like many others, they believe they could be producing better results but don’t know where to start on fixing the situation.
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By contrast, an innovation strategy should lead an organization to ask the critical question of “Where can we want to take the customer?” It should then empower leaders to put all options on the table to examine new approaches to reach the outcome, including products and company capabilities, and how they fit withing or change industry structure. The goal is to break out of conventional thinking of products and the structure of their industry to create something that is both unique and valuable to the customer and achieve something game changing as a result.

Explore this and other topics in the upcoming book Transformative.