Ben Sywulka

An Innovation Journey

Business Innovation

 

Business Innovation

What to do if my great idea doesn’t work

I learned a great lesson from my two-year-old daughter the other day. We were putting a puzzle together, and she was frustrated because the piece she had in her hand didn’t work.

I started thinking that this happens to us a lot in our innovation efforts. We have a great idea and we really want it to be successful. But often it is not. The experience with my daughter taught me two things:

1. Is this the right puzzle piece for the moment and context I am in?

So many times we have a great puzzle piece, but the other pieces needed to connect it to the puzzle aren’t there yet. We often don’t take the time to think through the scaffolding that needs to be around us in order for our idea to work. We may have a really valuable puzzle piece in our hand, but if you don’t have the other pieces that it needs to connect to, it is not valuable YET. We will first need to find the other pieces of the puzzle, the scaffolding, It could be that that scaffolding already exists in a different industry, or a different market, which will make it easier to connect our valuable puzzle piece.

2. Is this the right combination to make it work?

So many times we do have the right pieces of the puzzle, but we don’t rotate them around to make them fit correctly. We often don’t make an effort to tweak the combination to make our idea work. Maybe it’s a different positioning, or a different pricing, or a different customer, or even a different look and feel for the same product, but those things make a big difference.

Innovating for a New Normal

This article was published for Stars. I have pasted a portion of the article here, but you can download the full article on the Stars Website.

The COVID-19 Crisis has brought most businesses to a moment of reflection – either because demand has dropped significantly and they need to rethink their business model, or because demand has overwhelmed them, and they need to rethink their way of working. Writing from Guatemala, stars alumna Margarita KLOSE, who heads the impact investing team at Grupo IDC – a leading investment and consulting firm in Central America – and her colleague Ben SYWULKA from their innovation team share some insights on how to leverage this crisis to build new growth.

Understanding the bottlenecks to growth

Before jumping into an innovation process, it is important to get a better sense of where your growth bottlenecks are. A successful business generally operates in a “Business Loop”, where it designs a value proposition, takes it to market, gets customers to buy it or to agree to buy it, produces or acquires the products and services that comprise the solution, delivers the solution, then gets paid for it and uses those funds to pay for costs and to make a profit. After this, there is usually some customer feedback, which in turn helps the business design a new or improved value proposition, and the cycle starts over again. Though the order of these elements can vary by industry, most businesses operate with these basic elements.

Innovating for a New Normal

For many businesses, the bottleneck in the short term has accumulated around their cashflow management – an inability to “Get paid and Make Payments.” For some, overwhelming demand has led to a bottleneck around the production or delivery of their value proposition. Entire industries, however – such as tourism, airlines, luxury goods and retail – have fallen into a major bottleneck when trying to “get customers to buy.” Customers are cancelling contracts, reservations, or simply not showing up to buy. These businesses aspire to go back to a pre-crisis “normal” when the markets were not stalled and want the loop to start flowing again.

This is not easy to do, however, because your business is part of a larger “Value Chain Loop” of businesses that are all interconnected. The reason your customers are no longer buying from you is because their own customers have stopped buying from them, and these have stopped buying because their own customers have stopped buying as well. And your company is also a customer to your suppliers, who have stalled production because you stopped buying from them.

Breaking the vicious cycle through innovation

While governments try to implement stimulus packages to help keep the whole system from collapsing, the future of your company will depend more on the strategic decisions you make – how you respond and adapt your business loop to a new normal. Taking into account our innovation work with hundreds of companies over the years, we have developed some tools to help companies not only weather the crisis but to start a new chapter of growth because of it. We would like to share some of our insights with you.

Read the Full Article

How do I decide which market to go after?

When yo are in the initial stages of an idea, and when the market really doesn’t exist or there is little data about its size and growth, I have found it helpful to list all the markets you could go after, then plot them on a Suffering vs. Willingness to Pay matrix.

In this example with one of my clients, we realized that she was better off focusing her efforts on creating Jewelry for weddings (because brides want their bridesmaids to have matching dresses and jewelry) and jewelry that husbands can give to their wife (because husbands want to give something special but have a hard time deciding what to give). She could go after many types of clients, but there is more suffering for lack of a good existing solution and more willingness to pay with those two particular customer types.