The Four Phases of Innovation

When it comes to product innovation, it is in the Discovery stage when the real ‘magic’ happens. For me, it is the most exciting of the four stages in the product lifecycle, and it is the foundation of my book, The Salt Test.  

The Discovery stage is itself broken into four phases, as shown in the attached image. They are Problem, Solution, Build and Go To Market (GTM). 

In order to get your Product from idea to Scale, you will first need to go through each of the four phases and answer the key questions below:

1. Problem

• Who is your target market, and do they have the problem you think they have? Where do they currently go to find a solution for that problem, and what are the competitive alternatives?

2. Solution

• Is your solution a good fit for the problem, your target market, and your business? Is there anything stopping you from building your solution, and what makes your solution significantly better than the competitive alternatives?

3. Build

• What resources and people are required to build the solution, and what will it cost?

4. GTM

• How will you generate awareness of your idea, and what will this cost? What is your revenue model, your ongoing costs, and overall profitability? What metrics do you need to achieve to show you can scale the product? 

If you are just starting on your journey, then the answers to the above questions are likely to be assumptions. Coming up with these assumptions is a necessary part of this process, as this allows to you consider a path to success. However, be careful to not treat them as facts, because this is when you fall into the assumption trap. 

It is for this reason that the next step is to take your assumptions and test them one by one. You will start with the most important assumption in the Problem phase, moving your way down to the least. Once that is done, and you have validated them all, you can then move on to the Solution phase and repeat. If all goes well, you will continue through all four phases of Discovery, and on to Scale.  

However, it is likely that at least one of your assumptions will prove incorrect. If this is the case, you will need to revise your false assumption and test again. In the worst-case scenario, this may mean returning to a previous assumption and revising them too. Going from Problem to GTM and on to Scale is therefore not a linear process. There will be points along the journey where you will need to take a step back and revise some of your earlier assumptions before you can move forward again.  

This process of examining each of the four phases in Discovery, coming up with assumptions, and then testing them, is the inspiration for a model I have created, called the Product Phase Map. I will cover this in more detail at a later stage.