Battle testing your innovation strategy

BATTLE TESTING YOUR INNOVATION STRATEGY

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For additional information about Innovation

please visit www.InnovationGrow.com

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You won’t ever really know how well your products will do until you put them into the marketplace.

Even if you do the initial testing, your innovation still could fail if your innovation strategy uses a process that isn’t in line with the market; sometimes failing in spite of the best innovation strategy.

Most innovation failures occur from the misperceptions of the marketplace and your competition.

Making sure that you have a good competitive intelligence strategy will help you shore up these misperceptions, and not underestimating your competitors course of action will make sure that you prepare for the blowback.

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A great way to get around this bias to underestimate and fix some of the misconceptions is to integrate war game simulations into your company’s innovation strategy.

By trying to simulate the thoughts, plans, and reactions of your competitors you are able to improve and innovate while understanding the competitive impact that these innovations will create.

These insights will help your company gain a better understanding of the possibilities and better prepare to reduce surprises that can lead to the innovation failing.

Running these war game simulations with cross-functional teams from every department, will help to best simulate the diverse thinking from your competition and allow you to gain valuable insight that you need to make the innovation more successful.

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Although the simulations aren’t meant to accurately predict how the competition is going to react every time, it allows your company to realistically understand what they are capable of.

Also, if on the off chance, you discover that the competition did react as you simulated you will know how to react to minimize their effectiveness.

Armed with these insights you can identify a number of backup plans that could make the difference between and innovation succeeding or failing.

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These war game simulations can be incorporated into your innovation strategy or process so that it can be more complete and increase your testing process.

The more money and resources that you spend on testing and validating the innovative ideas and products the higher degree of success that you can expect to achieve.

This needs to be balanced with cost and time to find the perfect balance for your individual innovation strategy.

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These types of simulations have been around for a long time but the integration with an innovation strategy is fairly new and few companies have already adopted it for innovation, even if they are using it in a different part of the company.

Doing these war game simulations can improve your innovation strategy by identifying strengths and weaknesses that are crucial in the testing phase of innovation.

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GROWING BUSINESS WITH INNOVATION

For additional information about Business Innovation

please visit www.InnovationGrow.com