Creating innovation is as easy as N ABC

Curt Carlson who was CEO of SRI that was an organization that had been failing for 20 years. 

He implemented a value creation model and turned it around creating  SIRi many other innovative products . This methodology (NABC) (Needs,Approach, Benefits , Competition ) is now used by companies and governments around the world, including the U.S., Singapore, Taiwan, Sweden, Finland, Chile, and Japan.

Curt Carlson shares a whitepaper in the link below where he shares how Musk  Edison, Jobs, Sarnoff, Morita and Eastman have used this methodology .

Below is a small taste 

Creating an Innovative Product or business is like baking a cake 

To embark on a value creation journey - is like baking a cake - you need to start with a vision of what the cake will look like - but that’s not enough .

You need a recipe, access to the relevant ingredients and then persevere to discover the actual need, solution, and business model and then stay at it for years while pulling all the parts together.  

There are many ingredients - or factors that you need and have to come together, but generally, only a few essential factors determine the framework for success.  You must identify them at the start and then mitigate their risks to prove the innovation is feasible.  

Timing is super important 

The failure to get the timing right for an innovation is another reason so many initiatives fail.  It is like cooking a souffle – you must not be too early or too late.  The window of opportunity is often only a few years.  Jobs timed the iPhone perfectly.  

Below is a “Strawman” of the Value Creation model 

Value creation is a journey from the starting point on the bottom-left of the chart, where you “know nothing,” to the development of a valuable innovation.  

One of these ingredients is the knowledge from both technology and from other aspects of society, including trends in demographics, government regulations, and most importantly what the customer needs and prefers .  

You can never eliminate all the risks, endless issues come up, and the innovation evolves, as the zigs and zags on the chart indicate. 

These are the four fundamental questions that need to be answered 

• Is it a large and growing customer and market problem that impacts many?  
• Have you identified the actual need, the missing enabler, 
• Do you have a viable business model?  
• Can all the parts be assembled when you are ready to build the product and launch it into the marketplace?  

Innovating and trying to solve wicked complex problems requires an intense commitment to the value creation journey.  

 If you followed the value creation methodology, you will almost always mostly ended up in a good place. 

What it’s not about 

This form of enterprise strategy is not about writing 300-page business plans.  It is not about building huge teams.  And it is not about rapidly spending huge amounts of money.  Instead, it is about first getting the few fundamental concepts right and then aggressively de-risking them and the other elements of the solution, testing assumptions with potential customers, and finally building the offering. 

Here is a checklist of the strategic methodology described:

• Look for multiple "colliding exponentials," which often open major new white spaces.
• Identify a significant customer problem and market space.

Address the following key insights:

• Identify the actual important, growing unmet customer and market need.
• Pinpoint the missing ingredient that enables the innovation's solution.
• Create a viable starting business model.
• Provide evidence that all elements will be available to build and launch the offering - Cash 💰 being a significant ingredient
• Rapidly de-risk the key insights, major risks, and other potential barriers.
• Spend very few resources until the initiative is derisked, including the offering and business model.
• Assure a compelling and sustainable competitive advantage.
• Intensely drive the value creation process and identify a beachhead to get started. 

What did Musk say 

Musk says he focuses first on the fundamentals.  For example, he said, "Always go beyond memorizing formulas, passing tests, to always go deep into the underlying principles of a subject, to track any problem down to the root cause, buried in the dirt, in the dark."  In addition, he says, "The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur." 

About Curtis Carlson 

Curtis Raymond Carlson was president and CEO of SRI International from 1998 to 2014 and is a prominent technologist and pioneer in developing and using innovation best practices. While CEO of SRI International, revenue tripled to $550 million per year and tens of billions of dollars of new marketplace value was created, such as through Siri, an SRI spin-off company that was bought by Steve Jobs at Apple. 

While Carlson was CEO Mayfield Ventures partner, David Ladd, said, “SRI is now the best enterprise at turning its technology into economic value.”

He served on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF).

Here is a link to the article

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/strategy-creating-transformational-innovations-curt-carlson-ph-d-