Creating Insanely Great Customers | Always-On Innovation

A Perfect Storm is accelerating the dialogue and pace of innovation. It’s blurred the boundary of innovation and customer engagement disrupting companies and careers. Michael Connor, an Apple veteran, helps us harness the storm using “Always-On Innovation” to align strategy, development, and marketing to create breakthrough value for the planet’s most strategic customers, the “crazy” ones.

Here's to the crazy ones, . . . because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
— “Think Different” campaign, Apple Inc.

Are you looking for a way to move your company or your career forward?
We are in the midst of a Perfect Storm of continual and interconnecting innovation. That storm is disrupting companies and industries. It is also accelerating the dialogue and pace of innovation, and blurring the boundaries between how we innovate and how we engage customers.

What if you could lead your team successfully through that storm? You can.

The Answer: Focus on continually accelerating customer value.
“Creating Insanely Great Customers” focuses companies on the one thing that will keep them relevant and growing in the midst of a disruptive storm of innovation: Continually accelerating the value they create for their most visionary customers.

The challenge.
It’s not surprising in the face of that storm that most CEO’s have set customer engagement, innovation and process optimization as top priorities. What is surprising, is that most CEO’s aren’t happy with their progress. The book argues that lack of progress is due to one simple thing: Companies haven’t aligned and integrated those priorities into the day-to-day thinking and activities of their company with a single purpose “continually accelerating the breakthrough value they deliver to their most visionary customers.

The Roadmap
Michael Connor, the books author, a veteran of Apple and the silicon valley, advocates establishing “Always-On Innovation Zones” to address this issue. Using Agile/Lean practices to align and integrate strategy, product development, customer engagement and innovation initiatives, the Always-On Innovation Zone accelerates delivery of breakthroughs in areas that create high-value business outcomes and experiences for leading customers.

Creating Insanely Great Customers offers a powerful, well-thought out roadmap to help companies implement that vision and achieve those breakthroughs.
That roadmap is executed in five “Sprints”:
Vision: Reframes your mission to be “Always-On” creation of customer value
Identify: Identifies your most visionary “Insanely Great” Customers
Develop: Develops “Always-On Innovation Zones” that accelerate customer value
Engage: Engage customers in “Always-On” marketing and innovation initiatives
Transform: Transform the thinking, processes, and systems in your company to empower you, your team, and your company to become Always-On innovation catalysts.

Get your “crazy” on.
The Always-On approach advocated by Creating Insanely Great Customers enables you and your company to excel in markets driven by constant change. It helps you create a movement and a culture within your company that empowers individuals and small teams to become innovation catalysts. Catalysts that integrate customer value led thinking and innovation initiatives into their day to activities that help make them, their customer and their companies, Insanely Great. Go on. Shake things up. Get caught reading this book, then pass it on.