Insights on Innovation from U+

Whether local or global, the marketplace is becoming highly competitive. As a result, successful exploration of new ideas is crucial to the growth and efficiency of a company and the most essential way to protect market share.

Whether local or global, the marketplace is becoming highly competitive. As a result, successful exploration of new ideas is crucial to the growth and efficiency of a company and the most essential way to protect market share. With over 11 years on the market and over $1B in created value, U+ is able to offer valuable insights into growing businesses and the innovation process involved in successfully doing so. These insights include:

  • The importance of understanding your customer and generating 1st-party customer data
  • The common mistake companies are making is not doing enough market research, validation, and testing prior to writing code and developing ideas.
  • Why communication is key to the innovation process and how to keep it flowing in a remote working environment.
  • The Fast Follower strategy can save you time, budget, and resources.
  • How corporations are missing the mark at innovating and understanding their customers.

Expectations

We typically hear only the success stories – the startups with the right idea that are now soaking in monetary success. The truth is 90-95% of startups will fail. To improve your chances of success, manage your expectations by optimizing your innovation spend to get as many quality insights as possible before you begin building the product or service. Managing expectations means:

  • Understanding the customer before proceeding with the innovation process.
  • Knowing that success isn’t always guaranteed.

Understanding the consumer is the most critical part of the innovation process. Startups and corporations alike should spend a reasonable amount of time on the early customer identification stage of innovation before they begin writing a single line of code for a new product or service. At U+, we advise companies to begin with a validation and/or marketing testing sprint before starting development of the idea or solution. By reverse-engineering the truth from the market, learning who your customer is, what motivates them, and their pain points, you are ensuring you will have a product built specifically for your consumer that addresses and solves those pain points.

Process

Instead of building for market traction, companies frequently jump from strategy directly to technical development in order to fulfill KPIs, leaving an innovation gap. Following a standardized process and becoming a fast follower will help innovation portfolio management decision making and help your company learn and innovate quickly. Find your product or service’s value proposition by becoming a Fast Follower and watching the companies who were first to market before you begin. As a start, companies should answer the following questions about their innovation process:

  • Is there an early market?
  • Who is the product/service’s target demographic?
  • What will the pricing model be, and does it align with the target market?
  • Do the product features solve the customer’s pain points, so the product is well-positioned to get early traction?

Communication

  • Frequent, honest, and transparent over-communication is vital during the innovation process.
  • Avoid error, miscommunication, and lapsed deadlines in a remote working environment by overcommunicating through connected workspaces.
  • Stage-relevant teams can provide the expertise needed during each phase of innovation.

In the post-pandemic world, the odds are most, if not all, of your team is in various parts of the world. Unlike startups, where the team is small and able to collaborate closely, we can expect a corporation’s team to be broadly spread out and most likely global. When innovation is done right, everything changes rapidly. When your team does not sit in the same office as you, you lose the benefit of face-to-face interactions. Frequent communication is needed to stay aligned with your team and promote the overall growth of your company. The key is to have accountable leaders who over-communicate with the team and promote the idea of Stage-Relevance – ensuring the right people are in the right place. Communication is fostered through the use of connected workspaces. Having a direct 1:1 connection through Microsoft Teams, Slack, or another online collaboration app, allows the conversation to remain consistent and transparent. Open communication avoids any confusion and keeps the innovation process flowing. At U+ daily standups and weekly meetings are worked into the schedule as a means to avoid miscommunications, stay connected, and ensure goals are being met in a timely manner.

Innovating Within Corporations

Corporations contain skilled operators but lack innovators. Corporations need a stage-relevant team that possesses a growth mindset and a standardized execution framework to learn from. Our team at U+ is revolutionizing innovation by providing the proper mindset, framework, and experience to assist any company to listen, sell, serve, and communicate with its customers.

U+ has gained insights from providing 80+ businesses with the skills needed to grow and reach their innovation goals. Using these insights, our stage-relevant team can help your company grow and find the best possible version of your company’s innovative ideas in a cost-effective way.

How U+ can help you to innovate successfully

The U+ Method can efficiently and effectively lead the development, implementation, and improvement of innovations in any sector. To date, we have used this method to bring 80+ products to market, creating over $1 billion in value for Fortune 1000 companies. Check out our success stories here.

Get 20 minutes with Jan, the Founder and Global CEO, to learn more about how U+ can help successfully deliver innovative products and businesses to market.

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