White Papers
If you're interested in learning what's wrong with innovation, how success rates can be improved, or what Outcome-driven Innovation can do to help grow your firm, take some time to read these thought-provoking articles written by Strategyn's Tony Ulwick, Lance Bettencourt PhD, and Rick Norman.
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Ideas-first or needs-first: What would Edison say?
By Sarah Miller Caldicott
In just over 30 years, Thomas Edison pioneered six industries that today have a cumulative market value of more than $1 trillion. How did he do it? This article shows that Edison was ahead of his time, adopting a needs-first approach to innovation that is being hailed as the wave of the future today.
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What is Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI)?
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
This white paper helps readers achieve two important objectives. First, it underscores why innovation is a misunderstood, fragmented and ineffective process. And second, it helps the reader understand what ODI is, why it works and why it should be considered by innovation managers for adoption within their organization. Drawing on 20 years of hands-on innovation experience, Ulwick provides a unique historic perspective on innovation along with a clear description of ODI theory -- and the discoveries that have transformed ODI theory into practice. For those interested in understanding the future of innovation, this paper is a must read.
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The Language of Innovation
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
When building a competency in innovation, a company must adopt the best innovation process and the language that supports it. This primer introduces the terms needed to describe and discuss Outcome-driven Innovation. A shared understanding of innovation terminology is the first step in engaging the organization in healthy discussion around what innovation is, how the process should be executed and what approach to adopt. Unlike other innovation theories, ODI is described with precise language.
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A New Perspective on Strategy
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
The goal of strategy formulation is to create a unique and valued competitive position. But, until now, how this is achieved has been unclear. This article explains what strategy really is and why customer needs are the basic unit of competitive analysis. It also introduces the six growth paths that a company can pursue in any market to plot its growth and outflank its competitors. This article takes on many of the false beliefs that have unnecessarily complicated the formulation of effective strategies. The ideas introduced here will shape future conversations on this subject for years to come.
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A New Perspective on VOC
By Strategyn's Lance Bettencourt, PhD and Tony Ulwick
Responding to a public critique of its methodology by a competitor, Strategyn thought leaders prepared this article, which highlights the business advantages of the Outcome-driven Innovation methodology and the strategic and tactical differences between it and voice-of-the-customer (VOC) practices. VOC, they explain, is a tool for designing a product that has entered the product development process. It is not a tool for deciding what product enters into development. The authors explain how ODI has been optimized as a process for innovation and why it is superior to competing methodologies.
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Retiring the House of Quality
By Strategyn's Rick Norman and Tony Ulwick, with Richard Zultner of QFD Institute
Like VOC, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was created as a tool for product design – not as a tool for innovation. Interestingly, both of these useful design tools, when applied to innovation, failed to produce an effective result. This landmark article, written by the leaders of Outcome-driven Innovation and QFD practices, explains why the House of Quality should be retired as a tool for innovation and why ODI should become the standard innovation practice. A must read for all those who have struggled to use QFD for innovation.
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A Critical Evaluation of Outcome-driven Innovation
By Strategyn UK's Nicki Sutton
This thesis, prepared by Nicki Sutton when she was a graduate student at Cranfield University's Cranfield School of Management - Strategic Marketing Group, provides a "critical evaluation of Outcome-Driven Innovation." She describes it as "a new approach to listening to and incorporating the voice-of-the-customer throughout the innovation and new product development process." It takes a comprehensive look at the Outcome-Driven methodology, and analyzes more specifically how it applies to new product development processes.
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Outcome-Driven Segmentation
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
In the mid-1990’s, Ulwick recognized that needs-based segmentation didn’t work because there was no clear definition of what a need was. With the advent of ODI, Ulwick introduced outcome-based segmentation. Since that time, the idea of segmenting the market around the job the customer is trying to get done has been supported by academics such as Clayton Christensen and others. This historic whitepaper (with its original examples dating back to the mid-1990’s) sets the groundwork for the modern advancements made in the field of market segmentation.
