What is Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI)?
Tony Ulwick
Aug 27, 2009
By Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick
Today more than ever, companies are looking at innovation as the key to growth – a way to fight through difficult economic times. CEOs have appointed chief innovation officers and vice presidents of innovation or have established high-level innovation program teams to figure out how to become more proficient at innovation. Before a company adopts and institutionalizes an innovation program, however, it must decide which innovation processes and practices to employ. It’s a decision that will ultimately make or break a company’s innovation efforts.
Most of today’s innovation processes and practices date back more than 20 years – and they contribute to the 70–90 percent new product failure rates that companies currently experience.
Institutionalizing those failed practices will not help a company; rather, it will burden the company with an innovation handicap. A new, effective approach to innovation is needed.
That approach is Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI), a process that helps companies experience 80 percent success rates when bringing new products or services to market.
For nearly 20 years, Strategyn CEO Tony Ulwick has worked with his colleagues to develop, refine and execute the Outcome-Driven Innovation process, a jobs-based approach that transforms innovation from an unstructured, hit-or-miss process into a predictable, rules-based discipline.
Today, many companies support the theory that customers buy products and services for a specific purpose: to get jobs done. A job is defined as the fundamental goals customers are trying to accomplish or problems they are trying to solve in a given situation. Making the job the unit of analysis is the cornerstone of Strategyn's Outcome-Driven Innovation theory. From the customer’s perspective, it is the job that is the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centered because the job’s perfect execution reflects the customer’s true definition of value.
In this paper, Ulwick explains why most innovation processes are flawed and builds a case that a new, effective innovation process is needed, citing the benefits and successes of Outcome-Driven Innovation. For those interested in understanding the future of innovation, this paper is a must read.
