How do you scale and sustain your innovation once you find product-market fit?

When talking about value, I want to share something I present to my students in my entrepreneurship class. There are 2 values and 2 prices. Perceived and Actual. You make the purchase decision based on the perceived ones. You buy because the perceived value is higher than the perceived price. The real price is what you really had to pay. You bought a printer for a great price, just to find out how expensive the ink cartridges are... The actual value is what the product REALLY does, rather than what you were told it will. You find those long after the purchase. If either the actual value is lower than the perceived value or the actual price higher than the perceived price, you will feel misled and not be a loyal customer or a good reference.

To scale and sustain innovation, focus on delivering consistent and increasing value to your customers. Understanding their wants, needs, and jobs to be done is key. Use design thinking tools like empathy maps, personas, and journey maps to gain deeper insights into their pain points and goals. Additionally, lean startup methods like surveys, interviews, and experiments can help validate assumptions and test hypotheses about your value proposition.

Focusing on customer value has multiple facets. But the first element that comes to me is striving for value innovation! It means focusing on a leap in value for your customers while reducing costs! Value innovation can be achieved in several ways. Within the organization, the ideal is to streamline operations to achieve operational efficiency. Outside, I'd like to use Amazon's leadership principle: customer obsession. Among its various interpretations, it means striving for customer feedback and adapting accordingly. Also, creating real customer value means identifying new customer segments or markets. Your end point is to strive for value proposition resonating with your actual and potential customers.

Se alguma coisa não tem valor para o seu público, essa coisa não tem valor algum. E mesmo em se tratando de inovações é preciso estar atento, porque as pessoas mudam o tempo todo. Se você não se adaptar rapidamente para continuar atendendo às demandas novas que surgem do seu público, você acabara se tornando irrelevante.

Sometimes value is difficult to determine and different based on the market, segment, etc. For certain industries, it can mean delivering results that highly uncommon or unusual at other competitors. In healthcare, this is so important as we think about payment for value and delivering better outcomes. As the market is saturated with solutions, value solutions and innovations will rise to the top over time.

Once you have achieved the peak of the learning curve, it's time to capitalize, if you're lucky, on its incremental development, which means you need to optimize your business model by lowering costs and increasing production. I am particularly fond of the Business Model Canvas, which provides a rounded vision of your business according to nine perspectives. Among others are value propositions, channels, revenue streams, key resources, partnerships, and cost structure. As you scale, this tool offers the opportunity to iteratively refine and test your business model.

One of the ways to scale innovation is to reimagine the business model that can enable collaboration across various stakeholders. Enterprises have embarked upon platform business models to build an ecosystem of producers, partners, adjacent stakeholders to enhance the value proposition to customer. This in turn creates a virtuous flywheel effect which drives innovation at scale. Great examples of such open ecosystem innovation are Tesla, GE, Amazon.

Regularly evaluate your business model to identify areas for improvement and optimization. Explore different revenue streams, pricing strategies, and distribution channels to maximize profitability. Adapt your business model to changes in the market landscape and emerging trends to maintain relevance and competitiveness.

A scalable and sustainable business model is crucial. Define how you create, deliver, and capture value for all stakeholders. Lean startup tools like the business model canvas can help map out key elements like customer segments, channels, revenue streams, cost structure, and key resources. Track performance using metrics like unit economics, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value to identify areas for improvement.

A risk I have taken here, is going straight to the top, to embed that innovative learning culture! We know learning at all levels are key and when it comes to innovation, I feel that you need a spectrum of users in your early prototyping/testing etc. But I use a key point in time with senior execs to almost launch the prototype of the innovative learning solution. Why do I do this, its risky but if the senior leaders/executives like it and are on board, it makes role out/support/investment much much easier around that innovative learning culture.

I've learned a great deal about a learning culture over the past 10 years. What it is NOT is creating fear of failure and a mindset that new ideas are not welcome. Culture can't be something you talk about or write about. It has to be developed through actions and lived by its leadership daily.

Building a learning culture is, first of all, a change management issue. It can reveal to be an extremly time-consuming, challenging, and lengthy process, often leading to employee fatigue and potential disruption of initiatives. From my experiences, both positive and negative, keeping stakeholders energized and striving change initiatives remain on track are key. Consistently amplify the sense of urgency by continuously launching fresh, engaging initiatives and encouraging feedback! Bottom line, it's ideal to present evidence that the change efforts are beginning to yield positive results.

Innovation thrives in a culture of learning and experimentation. Embrace uncertainty, failure, and feedback as opportunities to learn and iterate. Design thinking methods like prototyping, testing, and iterating can be used to explore and validate ideas and solutions. Lean startup methods like the build-measure-learn cycle and the minimum viable product (MVP) can help you test assumptions and make data-driven decisions.

Humildade. Talvez esta seja a principal característica de alguém que tem uma cultura de aprendizagem, quer seja uma pessoa ou uma organização. O reconhecimento de que sempre há algo novo a aprender De que as coisas mudam o tempo todo e que nós precisamos nos adaptar é o início da nossa revitalização. Sem isso não existe cultura de aprendizagem.

Co-development, collaboration and partnerships have been the backbone of innovation for me. No one can go it alone and its nearly impossible to be creative without partners that will improve a design, product, or process.

Social networking works only if all participants are feeling its worth. Give to your network instead of just trying to take. Create opportunities and value for all, give credit every time you have a chance and be honest about it. Innovation world is a small world, your brand, reputation and trustworthiness will be known on its right level based on how you act.

Leveraging strategic alliances is a powerful approach to this! Beyond joint venture and equity/non-equity models, my thoughts currently swing between Ford and Keiretsu models. Ford's model means collaboration focused on specific projects or initiatives. This often entails sharing resources and expertise. The key benefits? Each company take advantage from other strengths and makes it easier to scale, streamlining costs. Keiretsu is the Japanese network model based on small share ownership between firms, particularly between buyers and suppliers. While closed, this model definitely allows strong collaboration and reduces risks.

Uma boa prática é utilizar a cocriação e colaboração para envolver sua rede de parceiros e apoiadores. Realize workshops e sessões de brainstorming conjuntos para integrar o feedback e as ideias deles no seu processo de inovação. Além disso, mantenha uma comunicação constante através de storytelling, compartilhando o progresso e as conquistas do seu projeto para fortalecer esses relacionamentos e garantir um apoio contínuo.

Scaling your innovation hinges on your network. Build and nurture relationships with customers, suppliers, distributors, investors, mentors, and peers. Design thinking methods like co-creation and storytelling can involve your network in the innovation process. Lean startup methods like customer development and lean launchpad can help you seek and incorporate valuable feedback, advice, and resources from your network.

To make an impact, scaling innovation is important to reaching end users, consumers or patients. Skating to where the puck is going will continue to be important for innovation to succeed in any industry.

I believe the very first step is to clearly understand our S-curve and its integration with our financial targets. This gives business innovation sustainability! To seamlessly develop a S-curve, fostering a culture of innovation within the organization is key. Also, investing a reasonable portion of profits in R&D should be mandatory. Staying attentive to everything happening inside and outside the organization and, of course, monitoring market trends are also crucial. From the product's perspective, leveraging user feedback to improve it is the real fuel of network effects and externalities! But remember —the basis for continuously innovating—is adopting a learning mindset, which enables comfort with ambiguity and adaptation capability.

Leverage on momentum. Once you find the market fit do not stop there. Push harder than before for your product to move from the prototype world to the actual user world. It should be good and safe enough for your intended users then you can release it for sale. As they use the first set of your products, speedily review remarks and feedback and vigorously innovate, fixing all bugs and incorporating new ideas and better features while removing redundant and ineffective ones.

Uma inovação deixa de ser uma inovação assim que ela chega ao mercado. Claro, você pode continuar fazendo uma inovação incremental e até deveria mesmo. Mas empresas como a 3M, por exemplo, sabem que o ideal é ter uma inovação atrás da outra. Para isso você precisa ter uma cultura de inovação e uma máquina de inovação. A cultura é a mentalidade. E a máquina é o processo por trás, no dia a dia, que faz a geração de novidades ser algo natural e repetitivo.

The innovation journey never ends. Monitor and anticipate changes in your market, industry, and environment. Identify and seize new opportunities for growth, differentiation, and impact. Design thinking methods like ideation and brainstorming can spark the generation of new ideas and solutions. Lean startup methods like innovation accounting and validated learning offer frameworks to track progress and evaluate the results of your innovation efforts.