Are you solving the right problem ?

By Dwayne Spradlin
Source : HBR, September 2012

Are you solving the right problem ?

Most firms aren’t, and that undermines their innovation efforts.

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it”, Albert Einstein said.

Those were wise words, but from what I have observed, most organizations don’t heed them when tackling innovation projects. Indeed, when developing new products, processes or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they are attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important.

Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

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InnoCentive, an online innovation marketplace, has created a process that any organization can use to define problems and articulate their strategic importance. It involves four steps :
1) Clarifying the internal (company) or external (market or customer) need for a solution.
2) Articulating the strategic importance of the solution to the firm
3) Researching how the firm and other organizations have already tried to solve the problem.
4) Creating a clear and complete description of the problem