the outcome driven blog

In response to a recent public critique of its methodology by a competitor, Strategyn is releasing today a white paper entitled A New Perspective on VOC, which highlights the business advantages of Strategyn’s innovation methodology and the strategic and tactical differences between it and traditional voice-of-the-customer (VOC) practices.

As Strategyn’s new white paper demonstrates, and contrary to the assertions made by Gerry Katz (vice president, Applied Marketing Science) in his September 2008 critique, there are no "troubling weaknesses" in Strategyn’s methodology. On the contrary, Strategyn’s approach to innovation is far superior to that employed by traditional VOC practitioners. Strategyn’s research practices are optimized for innovation: they are designed to capture and prioritize the customer inputs that planners and strategists need in order to discover market opportunities and devise winning product concepts that can then enter the development process.

Strategyn’s methodology is counterintuitive to many longtime VOC practitioners because traditional VOC tools, which were created in the 1980s, were intended to help engineers craft products and make design trade-off decisions after products had entered into development – in other words, after the product idea had already been generated. Traditional VOC practitioners have for years tried to persuade companies that the same tools are useful for innovation, but that is simply not the case, as product failure rates of 70 to 90 percent attest. Yet despite VOC’s ineffectiveness when it comes to innovation, its supporters continue to push and defend its applicability.

Because traditional VOC practices are flawed, many companies have come to believe that customers often do not know, or cannot communicate effectively, their actual needs and requirements. This is one of the major challenges facing businesses today. Because of this, businesses need to continue to find more creative methods of understanding customer requirements. Strategyn offers such a method.

In order to obtain the customer inputs needed for innovation, Strategyn’s methodology is not focused on the product – as are traditional VOC practices; rather, it is focused on understanding the job that the customer has hired the product to perform. As the white paper explains, this focus is necessary in order for companies to discover precisely where a market is under- or over-served and to formulate and deploy the appropriate market growth strategy. This fundamental shift in perspective, which is difficult for some longtime VOC practitioners to understand or accept, is far reaching as it impacts the way customer needs are defined, captured, prioritized, and used throughout the innovation process and for subsequent marketing activities.

Since 1991, Strategyn has been dedicated not only to advancing traditional VOC practices for the purpose of innovation, but more broadly to understanding and advancing every aspect of the innovation process. This includes selecting markets, targeting customers for value creation, understanding customer needs, selecting the right growth strategies, devising and testing ideas, and readying a product or service concept for entry into the development process.

In regard to the critique by Katz, Strategyn founder and CEO Tony Ulwick says, "We are always interested in critical views of our methodology – this is what has made it the unique and revolutionary tool for innovation it is today. But it should be noted that Katz, who recently published a critique of Strategyn’s methodology, has not been educated or trained in Strategyn’s methodology and has no experience capturing customer need statements as defined by Strategyn. As a result, the sample desired outcome statements that he fabricated for making key points in his critique were significantly flawed; they do not in any way resemble what Strategyn would consider to be well-constructed statements." Because he used flawed inputs in conducting his experiment, Katz’s conclusions are, in Strategyn’s view, flawed as well.

In the spirit of advancing the practice of innovation as a whole, Strategyn encourages dialogue regarding its methodology with all those who would like to participate. download Stategyn’s white paper response Strategyn Responds to a Critique of its Outcome-Driven Innovation Methodology | Business Wire | Find Articles at BNET