Jeff Dyer

Nathan Furr

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didn’t take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company—perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven’t known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator’s method—a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertainty—through cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success. Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

The Innovator's Method

Fabian Beiner

One's ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of behaviors.

Innovators were simply much more likely to question, observe, network, and experiment compared to typical executives.

Innovative companies are almost always led by innovative leaders.

These innovators steer entirely clear of a common cognitive trap called the status quo bias-the tendency to prefer an existing state of affairs to alternative ones. Most of us simply accept the status quo. We may even like routine and prefer not to rock the boat. We adhere to the saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," while not really questioning whether "it" is "broke." In contrast, innovators see many things as "broke." And they want to fix them.

Innovative entrepreneurs are often described as poor managers because they lack the ability to follow through on their new business ideas and are often irrationally overconfident in them.

Like Cook, we have found that observing is a key discovery skill for most innovators who tend to generate business insights from one of two types of observations:

1. Watching people in different circumstances who are trying to do a job and gaining insight about what job they really want to get done.

2. Observing people, processes, companies, or technologies and seeing a solution that can be applied (perhaps with some modification) in a different context.

Ten Questions to Ask While Observing Customers

Here are ten questions you should ask while observing customers to better understand the job they want done and how you can offer a product or service that will help them do it better.

1. How do customers become aware of a need for your product or service? Is there a way to make it easier or more convenient for them to find your offering?

2. What do customers really use your product or service for? What job is the customer hiring your product or service to do?

3. What does the customer ultimately consider as the most important features when selecting a final product or service? (If the customer has a hundred points to alate across all the features he considers important, how would he allocate them?)

4. How do consumers order and purchase your product? Is there a way you can make it easier, more convenient, or less costly?

5. How do you deliver your product or service? Can you do it faster, cheaper, in a completely different way?

6. How do customers pay for your product or service? Is there a way to make it easier or more convenient?

7. What frustrations do your customers have when trying to use your product? Do they use your product in ways you didn't expect?

8. What do consumers need help with when they use the

9. Do customers do things that hurt the longevity or reliability of your product or service?

10. How do customers repair, service, or dispose of your product? Are there opportunities to make this easier or more convenient (or teach the customer how to use the product so it requires less maintenance or to do self-maintenance)?

The Innovator's Method quotes

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