A world-renowned innovation guru explains practices that result in breakthrough innovations

Ulwick's outcome-driven programs bring discipline and predictability to the often random process of innovation.

For years, companies have accepted the underlying principles that define the customer-driven paradigm--that is, using customer requirements to guide growth and innovation. But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually.

In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as outcome-driven innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.

Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as needs, benefits, specifications, and solutions, Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal voice of the customer and focus on the metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done. Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives.

With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to:

• Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possible
• Recognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors do
• Identify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer value
• Systematically define breakthrough products and services concepts

Innovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.

As the dominant paradigm of economic activity is shifting to a focus on creating customer value, it is becoming increasingly clear that companies must be able to formulate business strategies, product and service strategies and internal operating strategies that accelerate the creation and delivery of customer value. The ability to create value has become the primary source of sustainable competitive strength. With this book, Ulwick introduces a strategy formulation theory and process that allows firms to create strategies that consistently produce breakthrough results. The application of advanced modeling and pattern detection techniques commonly reserved for physics and the behavioral sciences is used in both the design of the theory and in the process it initiates; its application can result in strategies and solutions that delivery up to ten times more value than those created with traditional methods. It is a process that can be broadly applied across an organization and a wide range of subjects or missions.

Ulwick describes Outcome-Based Logic, which can transform organizational dynamics and the way an organization approaches the process of strategy formulation, and proposes a Universal Strategy Formulation Model which defines the four essential elements of strategy creation: desired outcomes, constraints, the desired competitive position, and solutions. Using this model, it becomes possible for an organization to first choose its desired competitive position and then work to uncover the strategy or solution that will enable it to occupy that position. The book also introduces a process called the Customer-Driven Mission Achievement Process (CD-MAP), now successfully used by many large companies to formulate and assess strategies at every organizational level of their organizations. This book, steeped in modern business theory and backed by years of practical experience, will help practitioners in any company improve their operations and their competitive position.