Increase Strategic Value
Think about the Strategic Value for your idea using this formula – it may help clarify the relationship between results/outcomes/effectiveness and efficiency.
Strategic Value = Effectiveness / Efficiency
Effectiveness may include factors like the customer’s experience and achieved outcomes/results (did it enable customer’s aspirations or solve customer’s problem).
One way to interpret this is that optimizing an idea to increase the overall effectiveness may be significantly more beneficial than making the idea more efficient. Of course a key part of the problem to be solved may center around efficiency – and in this case you may need to consider efficiency above the line as well.
Map Your Innovation Portfolio
Consider identifying innovative aspects across your current portfolio of systems and services – and then map them within a 2×2 box to better visualize how/where you’re being innovative and where might be your strengths.
Y-Axis: Strategic Impact (perceived uniqueness: contributor on the bottom – core differentiator at the top)
X-Axis: Strategic Relatedness (perceived relevance: sustaining to the left – reframing to the right)
We all might like to be in the top right corner, but sometimes it’s more important to know our real strengths and build from there.
Map-out Your Approach
There are many ways you can approach implementing your idea. Some ideas may be able to fit easily within your existing workstreams – or could be without too much effort. Other ideas may benefit from a more incremental approach.
Consider whether implementing/building a Proof of Concept might first help to prove the proposed solution works.
Especially when it’s a larger idea, then implementing/building a Proof of Value may help to prove it will work for your customer.