In today’s mortgage market, how much is your company’s (lender or vendor) next great innovation worth to your company and the industry as a whole? As the mortgage industry works to redefine itself amongst severe economic conditions and rapidly changing regulations, the answer to this important question could be significant. Just ask Apple the value of the iPod, or Microsoft the impact windows has had.
Innovation is the key to corporate growth, yet when pushed to define the process by which organizations follow to successfully innovate with predictable results, it is clear that many companies lack a true innovation strategy.
According to Anthony Ulwick, founder and CEO of Strategyn, “With new theory, frameworks, and practices, innovation has been transformed from an unstructured, hit-or-miss process into a predictable, rules-based discipline.”
Strategyn is a pioneer in Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). The methodology, described in Ulwick’s book What Customers Want, takes innovation management from an unstructured business practice into a predictable discipline.
The approach is based upon customer jobs and outcomes. While it promotes listening to customer input, it stresses the method by which the input is collected, used and applied. The solutions should not be focused around needs and benefits, but rather on the outcomes customers want a given service or product to have. One focused on the jobs/tasks that customers are actually working to address.
Strategyn states it as this” The ODI method is based on two simple yet compelling principles:
1. Customers use products and services to help them get jobs done.
2. Customers have a range of measurable outcomes they wish to achieve as they try to get a job done.
By identifying important yet unsatisfied jobs and outcomes, Outcome-Driven Innovation reveals precise areas of opportunity for market growth, disruption or the creation of new markets.”
In essence, Outcome-Driven Innovation provides a structure and methodology for understanding who your actual customers are, what jobs they are trying to perform and a way to measure the level of success of each of those jobs. That in-depth understanding allows companies to innovate with much greater success and predictability.
With the opportunity for the mortgage industry to redefine the industry’s landscape, lenders and vendors are looking for innovation to help drive corporate growth. When challenged to do more with less, it is even more critical to have a proven innovation methodology that provides predictable results with much greater certainty than the traditional look at needs and benefit that are uncovered during a brainstorming session.
Increasing innovation is critical if we are going to reshape the face of the mortgage industry. We can do it through traditional methods or look for innovative thinking such as the one presented by Outcome-Driven Innovation.
Please let us know what you think. Are you cutting back on innovation during these difficult economic times? Or are focusing on customer jobs and outcomes to drive innovation in this new mortgage market?
