FAST Innovation® Consulting Services

Your organization can’t be the best at everything. Therefore, you should not try to improve every aspect of your business. Instead, you only want to innovate where you differentiate. This powerful process helps you uncover what sets you apart from the competition and use that to drive your innovation strategy. We look at your differentiator through five lenses:

• Distinctive – Your differentiator must help you stand out in a crowded market.
• Durable – What you offer must be difficult for the competition to replicate.
• Dynamic – Tomorrow’s competition may be new entrants that make your business irrelevant.
• Desirable – Your customers determine your differentiator, and they must value what you offer.
• Disseminated – Once you have defined your differentiator, it is then used to prioritize innovation investments.

The resulting framework can help your organization massively increase the returns you receive from your innovation investments.

This is the “F” part of the FAST Innovation Model – which stands for FOCUS.

This content will be in Stephen’s next book, PIVOTAL.

• Gather challenges and opportunities from leaders, customers, vendors, 3rd parties, universities, and trendsetters
• Assess strategic relevance (“are you asking the right questions?”)
• Reframe the challenge in a way that will increase the likelihood of it being solved (“are you asking the question the right way?”)
• Document the challenge (write-up what you want in a “brief” that accelerates solution finding)
• Determine the best path for finding solutions (“are you asking the right people?”)

Sometimes the best solutions to your challenges can be found by those not tasked with finding the answer. Therefore, organizations are turning more to open innovation and crowdsourcing as methods for finding solutions to most of their challenges. This can take many forms:

• Collaborating with different departments or divisions within your organization
• Looking to the entire organization for potential solutions
• Working with trusted 3rd parties (e.g., universities or consultants)
• Leveraging external crowdsourcing as a means of finding solutions anywhere in the world
• Partnering with suppliers and customers
• Using “tech scouting” to find existing solutions
• Leveraging innovation competitions and tournaments
• Using open innovation “bounty hunting” (paying only for solutions that meet specific criteria)

You will learn how to navigate through the confusing maze of options and pick the best method for your specific challenges. When done incorrectly, open innovation and crowdsourcing can create extra work with little result. When done properly, you will find breakthrough solutions in less time, with lower cost and reduced risk.

This is the “S” part of the FAST Innovation Model – which stands for SHIFT.