Process Innovation

Manifesto: Process Innovation

As the CEO of a small market-making think tank, GISTICS, a facilitator of executive peer-workgroup sessions, and a public speaker known for provocative visionary keynotes, my team and I speed the service-innovation processes of major enterprises.

An extensive survey of the literature on service industries and innovation reveals one extraordinary fact: service innovation does not exist as a practice.

Most successful product firms have structured, repeatable processes for innovating new products. In fact, the IT industry provides some really great infrastructure for speeding product innovation: CAD, PLM, 3D simulation, online research panels, etc.

Most service firms have informal, unstructured, and problematic processes for innovating new services. In fact, most service firms do not innovate, or at least, not well or consistently.

Of the many changes brought by the Web, few changes match this one: All firms, including traditional product firms, now have a significant and growing service-delivery component that often drives incremental revenues and profit growth.

Product firms have evolved into hybrid service firms.

Most of these services entail digital self-service capabilities.

And, still, most of these firms — product, service or hybrid — do not have structured, repeatable processes for innovating new services, especially new digital services.

Because these new digital services entail customers’ experience of the firm, these new digital services, by definition, constitute a new brand or an extension of the firm or products and services.

Let me say this another way: most of these firms do not have structured, repeatable processes for service-innovation of digital brands.

Okay. What can we bring to that situation?

Innovation Leaders Academy

Well, for starters, we bring a structured, repeatable processes for service innovation in the form of a two or three-day company-wide workshop call the GISTICS Innovation Leaders Academy.

In the Academy, we work with an executive sponsor or COO, defining visionary future-state capability — a service innovation that will drive incremental revenues and profit growth. By definition, this innovation entails a highly differentiated innovation and a breakthrough market-making strategy.

Short on a visionary future-state capability? Go to a bookstore or Amazon, pick any of the top business books. If you have not found one visionary future-state capability by the time you have read the back-cover and intro, put the book down, and pick up the next one. My point: Almost without exception, all these books define, espouse, or proclaim at least one good visionary future-state capability.

In fact, we have too many visionary future-state capabilities! Rather, we find that most firms need a structured, repeatable process for building new operational capabilities.