Jacob Dutton breaks down three sequential checkpoints for corporate innovation: opportunity-company fit ensures ideas align with strategy and resources, problem-solution fit confirms the solution actually solves a real customer problem better than alternatives, and product-market fit proves there's real market demand before scaling. Skip any of these and you waste money.
Chapters
But product-market fit as corporate innovators isn't the only fit that we need to be aware of. You know, we make sure that there's, you know, sizable market demand for, you know, the new product, the new service that we're developing, because if it doesn't, then investing in rolling those out is gonna be really, really costly, right? Before we even get into pilots, we have to have ideas, right? And we also have to make sure that, you know, before our ideas even turn into pilots, that they have what we call problem-solution fit. So, you know, is this thing that we're working on actually solving a genuine and significant customer problem in a better or maybe a more efficient way than existing solutions do that? Or is it a solution looking for a problem? And before we even get to ideas, you know, we should also be making sure that the opportunity areas that we're working in, you know, align with our company's strategic objectives, with the resources that we have available, the skills, the culture of the business. Otherwise, there's very little point in developing ideas, much less pilots within this space. And these different kinds of fit, they kind of exist across the innovation lifecycle. At the very beginning, before we even invest in understanding customer problems and developing solution concepts, we have to make sure that we're playing in a territory which has opportunity-company fit. And then when we've invested in understanding customer problems and developing solutions, you know, it's at that point we have to ensure that there's problem-solution fit. And it's only once we've done that that we can sort of run pilots, start to find product-market fit, and generate what is hopefully sort of perpetual growth.
