Building new businesses is challanging. Most (90%+) startup companies fail. Large enterprises face particularly acute challenges in launching disruptive new ideas. Organizational inertia, legacy business models, and lack of leadership support can easily stall innovation and growth. But when companies combine an entrepreneurial approach with unique strengths such as brand, distribution, and other assets, they can increase the odds of launching high-impact growth businesses. MIKULITSKI helps different size companies to capitalize on these opportunities by helping them to:

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• Spot high-potential new opportunities by developing deep insight into customer jobs to be done

• Build a structured process to translate market insight into high-impact ideas – quickly and rigorously

• Conceive and design new customer solutions, products, business models

• Optimize innovation portfolios and prioritize opportunities

• Prototype and pilot new ventures, with an emphasis on “testing and learning” to minimize risks

• Minimize uncertainty through emergent strategy

• Scale promising new ventures

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Our approach to accelerating innovation integrates deep experience working with multinationals, our own investments in start-up companies, and academically grounded principles. Our delivery model includes a range of support, including in-market research, analysis, solutions design, planning development, immersive workshops and intensive boot camps. Learn more about our approaches below.

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CREATING CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS USING JOBS TO BE DONE

Even for companies passionate about customer centricity, creating breakthrough solutions that tap into a real customer need or frustration can be difficult. The challenges are many: You have great data about existing customers, but know little about noncustomers. Your customers tell you they are happy, but demonstrate low loyalty and inconsistent guidance about tomorrow’s products and experiences. Ideation efforts to create new solutions generate lots of enthusiasm – but fail to produce ideas that stick.

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We partner with clients to overcome these obstacles. Our approach to understanding what truly drives customer choice and designing an innovative value proposition begins with understanding the customer’s “job to be done.” The premise is simple: customers don’t really buy products. They “hire” them to do a job. Instead of asking what products customers want to buy, we ask what fundamental progress they are seeking to achieve.

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Jobs to be done provides a more solid basis for innovation because it pinpoints nonconsumption and where customers are deeply frustrated. It goes beyond traditional categorization schemes to provide unique, actionable insights and more accurately open up high-potential opportunities.

To design solutions and experience that solve real problems and achieve tangible results, it’s important to combine discipline to creativity efforts. Our solution design framework produces new ventures that are original, practical, and scalable.

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We focus on three critical activities: INVESTIGATE to uncover barriers and opportunities, IDEATE by drawing on deep customer insights, and INTEGRATE solutions and business models to shape new ventures that can be accelerated and tested in the market. Our Business Lab at Brain Embassy provides a unique space for client teams to do creative thinking, ideation and bringing new concepts to life.

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BUSINESS MODEL DESIGN

Successful enterprises typically have a strong legacy business model driving their core business. But capturing new growth opportunities requires different and often disruptive business models. This is not easy and can take decision makers out of their comfort zones.

 

Business model innovation is about fundamentally rethinking your business around a clear—though not always obvious—customer job, then realigning your resources, processes and profit formula with this new value proposition. It’s not easy and can take decision makers out of their comfort zones. But the results can be dramatic.

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Innosight’s four-box approach to business model innovation guides the formulation of a comprehensive blueprint for a business model and all the necessary assets to deliver that value. We envision a range of models and help to prioritize choices based on company goals and bounds. We help clients develop not just great ideas but also fully formed business models to create, capture, and deliver value.

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THE CRITICAL FIRST MILE OF INNOVATION

Every new idea is partially right and partially wrong. The challenge, especially when companies are entering a new market, is to know which is which. Flawed assumptions can derail a promising new business and is one of the reasons innovation’s “first mile” –when an idea moves from a concept on paper to the market–is often plagued by failure. Less than one percent of products launched by big companies end up having real impact.

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A test-and-learn approach, based on the principles of “emergent strategy,” enables companies reduce uncertainty and pivot away from the path of failure onto the path of eventual success.

Our unique framework breaks the process down into four steps: Document an idea in a range of formats to help surface hidden assumptions. Evaluate an idea from multiple angles, including financial analysis and real customer need, to increase confidence. Focus on addressing the most critical strategic uncertainties and “deal killer” risks, such as lack of consumer demand. Test your idea and adjust based on marketplace and other experiments to address the most critical uncertainties.