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Hi and welcome to Sussex Pioneers. I'm Joseph Bradfield, PR and Communications advisor. This is episode 5, Mining for Gold, which is all about how to capture the value of what you've created. As your business continues to grow and innovate, it's essential to identify, capture, protect, and measure what you're developing and investing in. We'll be hearing from more of our East Sussex innovators about how they protect their innovations, but first up, it's time for Paul Nightingale, Professor of Strategy from the University of Sussex Business School, to talk about capturing value.
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How can you tell if your innovation actually delivers value? Can you measure and quantify that value? How can you protect the value your innovation creates and stop your competitors profiting from it? Intellectual property is one of the main types of assets that help to protect value. These include patents, copyrights, and design rights. Patents, in particular, prevent anyone else from capturing the value of your innovation unless they pay you for the privilege. However, they involve meeting a lot of requirements, such as demonstrating novelty and clearly disclosing how the innovation works. Patents need to be enforced and kept up to date, possibly across many territories, which can be expensive.
Given these challenges, other types of assets are important for SMEs and startups with limited funds or resources. These are the defendable territory of the business and include things like secret or hard-to-copy processes, or more fluid concepts like brand, customer relationships, or after-sales services. Look at what you have at your disposal to make you more attractive to customers. Measure KPIs like lead times, production costs, and brand awareness. Create strategies like high switching costs to lock in value, or scale the business through franchising or distribution licenses.
Innovation needs to be measured so that the business can gain insight and keep improving. Early on, we looked at innovation as a series of experiments. You can capture the learning from those experiments using post-project reviews, benchmarking KPIs against each other, or carrying out regular innovation audits to understand what has or hasn't worked and why. As you learn to protect and measure value, you will start to create a cycle of continuous improvement that increases returns and reduces the risk for future projects. Let's hear from our business leaders about how they capture and measure value.
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The biggest challenge we face as a video game studio is that our products need to be fun, and fun is quite difficult to measure. It's very subjective and quite amorphous. There isn't a list of points that if you hit, you have a success. So we have, we do use a kind of gut feel, we use our instinct, and we've, we've educated ourselves in, in video games and played a lot of them and listened to a lot of, a lot of feedback, read a lot of reviews. So we feel like we've developed a good instinct for it. But we need to keep ourselves honest, so keep checking with our consumers. And we can do that by live interview testing or by running services that are online where people can play in their own homes. We send them the game, they load it onto their phone or their console, and then they video themselves as they play it, and they try and speak their thoughts, they try and think out loud so that we can then interpret those, interpret that feedback and change the game accordingly. So that's pre-release.
But once the game is live, we have a whole new suite of tools that we can use. We get real-time data from the, from each of the, from each of the games on how people are spending, what they're finding hard, where they leave, um, at which point during the initial funnel of the game, which is the sort of maybe the first half an hour or the first two hours, um, where they're learning things and they're facing new challenges and they are overcoming all of the, all of the things that we've kind of laid out to them, they're learning the game. Um, we can find out when people drop off and then we can say, well, if there's a really high, high proportion of people that drop off in this particular event, then we can go back and try and figure out what it is that they're finding difficult and address it, change it, change the future, put more education features in there.
We measure our success based on KPIs such as player engagement, retention, which is whether a player came back on day two, day three, day four, day three, six, five, um, conversion from free to paid, and then how much revenue that, that each person is paying. We can use those KPIs to help us make decisions about which feature we choose to develop next and which will give us the most value based on those KPIs. And we can, we have models that can figure out based on those KPIs what the return on investment is likely to be. And so it takes the emotion out of the decision of, "I want my favorite feature," the creative director might want their favorite feature. It adds a little bit of science and allows us to make an objective decision.
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Health company and platform. We had to do lots of listening. We thought from our angle, we knew lots of the answers. We'd experienced lots of the pain points, but sometimes people didn't perceive things the same way as us, particularly the nursing staff, norways, or the patients saw things a different way. So we had to do a lot of listening, a lot of surveying, um, and a lot of time just to understand other people's point of view. Definition Health, being a medical company, is very data-intensive. So we collect a lot of information, be that from patients when they're filling out the questionnaire, right through to user feedback surveys that we've got built into the app that allow us to view the information, build user stories, and develop the app based on user feedback, which is ultimately what you want to be doing as a digital health company. When collecting data from hospitals, we feed that into developing our products and then we'll relay that back to the hospital. So we'll give them an idea of new features that we're building and the kind of sort of information that we're collecting, and that can help sort of feed into outcomes also for hospitals to help them understand sort of trends in patient data. So a collection of, say, for example, BMI information, how that relates to different conditions and to different patients at different ages, and how that affects their procedures and then obviously their recovery post-surgery as well.
If I had to describe the most exciting thing that's happened, I'd find it quite hard. There's been one quite big exciting thing. We were awarded to be on the National Innovation Accelerator program, which basically the NHS recognizing us as being worthy of being promoted to the rest of the NHS. That was, that was great. That was brilliant. But I have to say, it's the little, the little victories. I think there are more exciting when the patient says, "Oh, I could never have done this without you," or, "Well, thank you so much for giving me that extra information." To me, that is the excitement, and that's why we did it.
So we're going to have a conversation about protecting the value in your innovation, but first, let's meet our guests. Because you introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Tanya Poppow, I'm the Head of Innovation at Sussex Innovation. Hi, my name is Adam Fosha. I work at Definition Health. We provide a total digital solution for private and NHS hospitals. I'm Fiona Bennett from Sussex Innovation, and my specialism is lean business transformation and developing continuous improvement culture. I'm Jason Event, and I run a video game production company called Hardball Games. Lovely to meet you, Jason. Okay, so the first question is, I need to understand what do we mean when we talk about value in terms of innovation?
So if I take that one. So really, value can range from a wide, um, kind of spectrum, particularly with entrepreneurs and innovators. So for some people, it's coming up with a new idea within your team, and they've reached their goal of at least stimulating ideas. Right. For other people, it's about being able to go out to market, to the local market, and having local customers. And for other people, it's about scaling globally. So are you a big tech company who's looking to become a unicorn, for example? For some people, they've only reached their goal and captured value when they're in, I don't know, 30, 40 markets globally. And so there's a range, really. And that's up to you to set your goals as an entrepreneur, as a company, and to really think about how far you can go. And it's understanding how good your idea is, how well the market responds to your idea. And that's, we're talking about really customers, your stakeholders, and investors alike.
Okay, because I'm really interested, why should SMEs care in that case? I think with SMEs, it's understanding one, first of all, when you have a good idea. You know, we've talked about this kind of, uh, frequently, and you yourself can think that you have a good idea, but it only really begins to capture value when the market recognizes that. So your customers, or your stakeholders, are, as I said, your investments. Um, and so for, I think for an SME, it's first recognizing when you have a good idea that is essentially going to be profitable, right? So that's its value. Exactly. Exactly. But then currently, where we are with sustainability, there's the additional ideas of value, the impact that you'll have for society, your local community, or equally globally, environmentally. And so these things, we talk about on innovation, have in value. Does value grow as your business grows? What would you say are the key values in your businesses?
We actually categorize our values into five different types of value. So there is obviously the commercial value, which everyone loads and loves. There's the customer value, which is extremely important. There's the efficiency value, so that's doing something that improves the way in which your business performs or operates internally. There's market value, which actually extends your solutions and your your innovations to a wider market. There's risk reduction, which makes your obviously your brings your company to less risk and makes them more resilient. And then there's also future value, which opens the doors to more customers and more.
That's interesting. Other value coming in? Are we saying that the value is the impact of the problem we're trying to solve to the end user? I'd say to the customer, ultimately. Because if you're just solving any problem, well, whose problem is it that, who cares about what that problem being solved is? And I like your analogy back to the cafe, because a cup of coffee, a latte, whatever it might be, a cup of tea, you can go and make a coffee at home so much cheaper than you can actually go out to a cafe. So what is it that draws someone, the customer, to go into that cafe in the first place? And why choose your cafe versus the cafe across the road? What is the value that that customer is placing? Not just, it's not clearly about price in this perspective, because you can get it cheaper elsewhere. There's something else going on.
Yeah, look at the market. Look, look at who's, look at who's, who's the footprint, who's the foot traffic? Or if it's not foot traffic, then have you got parking spaces? Because people are going to have to come. If it's not for passing trade, then they're gonna have to drive there. Um, but you could, and if it's, if it's, um, the mother and kids market, well, you probably need a little soft play or something at the front. Yeah, that's very different from saying, "Oh, we've got responsibly sourced coffee," or "The ambiance is really nice." You know, if you're, oh, that's important property for everyone. Yeah. If there's, if somebody's offering that down the street, but you've got soft play so that you can look after the, look after the people's children, you choose the soft play because it's better to have, it's better to not have to deal with your kids really trying to drink coffee. So it really depends. The problem, and I, I'd also kind of argue with the fact that it's that the, the innovation is always pointed at the consumer. The consumer is the ultimate beneficiary because these are, you know, these are businesses. And whether it's a business-to-business business, or whether it's direct to consumer, or something in between, the consumer will always benefit. But if you can find a way of, you know, increasing your margins by by being very innovative about who you hire and how you hire them, um, or if there's, if there's some other way that you can improve the business, it's, it's a benefit to the business owner. Obviously, then that means you can keep on going, maybe maybe you can improve your, improve your service to your customer. But yeah, it's not always, it's not always consumer-focused. It's consumer-focused, even though, even though they're the beneficiary.
Yeah, I feel like we've, it's nice because I feel like I've got a really nice strong definition of what value means in innovation and, and also the, the breadth of value that you can have. I want to dig into finance. How, what is the value of finance in innovation? What can it do for your innovation? So you touched on it actually through yourself, Adam, and yourself, Jason. You touched on a couple of aspects of finance in that, in terms of cost value and reducing costs and price points to a customer as well. So ultimately translating some of these into financial transactions at the end, your profit in the end. Yeah. If you're going, and I've always said, if you're going into a business and you cannot translate that into a profit, and it's really just a loss, then all you've got is a very expensive hobby. Yeah. Um, yeah, it really is. What are you doing this for? There's a lot of fun, perhaps, but you just got this really expensive thing you're doing. It's a hobby, it's not a business. So there's, for pure financial terms, it comes down to profit in that sense.
So why does anyone care? Obviously, this is what if you're then going to look for that investment down the track, wherever that investment comes from, from crowdfunding, from traditional equity routes, from bank loans, that kind of thing. Those investors are going to be looking for their return on investment, of course. And that's generally in traditional senses thought of in terms of something financial here. So, um, but I really like the definition. So that's in the traditional sort of, sort of thinking about value and translating it directly to finance. However, as we just discussed in the cafe analogy, value is something else. Potential. I like the fact that you've got, um, one of your value propositions is about future, uh, values and the potential to innovate and unlocking that. Yeah. And the sustainability angle as well, impact on society or an environmental impact, reducing our carbon footprint, our greenhouse gas emissions, that kind of thing. So there again, beneficial, intangible, sort of, yeah, in a way. And so it's a little bit more nebulous to think about some of these other benefits and impacts that are not purely financial terms. So that's really interesting in that sense. I think as well, we're talking about finances, it's very interesting the difference between what an entrepreneur will perhaps sell in terms of value and on the other side, what an investor is looking for. Because as you say, entrepreneurs can be very wedded to their ideas. Um, and so they often go in and particularly when they're raising, they will impress the point, investor, this, this is this amazing product, look what it can do. And I know our resident, kind of, finance expert, that will tell you, investors don't really care about how good your idea is. Yeah. Going back to, you know, what does this mean to entrepreneurs? And so they're so focused on the value of their new initiative, on their new service. And investors are interested in one thing, one thing only: finances. Right. Growth. Exactly. This is, this is where your business goals come in. So that's one of the first things you have to do is set your business vision, which needs to link to your business goals. And your business goals as a company is to make profit, usually, unless you're a charity, of course. But your vision might be something else. And that's going to be ultimately achieved by your product goals being aligned to it, and also your user goals. Because if you can achieve what your users are trying to achieve in their lives, then you're going to meet your vision, and then you're going to meet your business goals. They're all interlinked. And you can, you can have your entire business strategy all lined up from sprint goals all the way up to vision using objectives and key results and all sorts of other techniques to do that and achieve that. Yeah.
I'm going to have to round up this conversation. Just pause it for now because there's a video I'd like to watch.
Do you know the value of your innovations in your business? Do you struggle with managing data, not knowing where to start or what to measure? Don't panic. You're not the only one. According to Forbes, almost 50% of SMEs don't even know the key aspects they should be tracking. Some companies can protect their ideas through patents or copyrights, but that can be costly and complicated. There are simpler and cheaper ways. By using well-defined KPIs, key performance indicators, you can understand your secret sauce, the hidden collection of processes driving value in your business, giving you the competitive edge. Let's start with the basics. KPIs are measures showing the health and progress of your business. How do you choose the right ones? Why you should track depends on your industry, business stage, and goals. Here are three types to get you started.
First, financial metrics. These are focused on revenue and profit margins. A good starting point is the net profit, demonstrating the current surplus or deficit. Simply put, are you making more than what you spent? Other finance metrics include working capital or net cash position.
Second, customer-focused KPIs. Center on market position, satisfaction, or retention. Start with simple tools such as surveys or focus groups to evaluate new products prior to launch. By reviewing your sales pipelines alongside customer conversion rates and sales numbers, you can build a compelling story of where the real value lies in your customer base.
The third category is operational performance indicators, which measure the activities and impact of different departments, including administration, logistics, and production. Typical metrics include gender pay gap, delivery times, stock levels, and energy use.
This seems like a lot of information to collect and evaluate, but here are my top tips. Start with the right question. Consider your business objectives. Are you more focused on generating sales revenue or growing your client base? Less is more. If you start by focusing on a couple of KPIs each quarter, before you know it, you will have a simple set of KPIs that are action-oriented, driving positive results. Finally, you don't need sophisticated systems. Talk through ideas with your team and find the easiest way to collect the data you need. If you need further help or want to know more about KPIs and tools to track them, we invite you to get in touch with us at Sussex Innovation.
So tech companies are often good at getting feedback from customers and users. How can SMEs do in a similar way? So, yeah, you're right. So tech companies have analytics, so you can watch and see what people are doing, and the data comes spewing out. And we've also got, we've also established methods for kind of watching videos of people interacting with software and playing our games and giving us, or playing our, using our software and giving that, giving us feedback. But the principle can be used by everybody, essentially. That you need to, once you've identified your target audience, you kind of need to get to know them. So simply, you can ask them questions. You know, go and go and identify, identify your audience, and then find, find members of that population and kind of ask them, ask them questions and figure out whether, whether their needs are met by existing products and then, or services, and then find opportunities. We've done that. We've done this for ourselves. I mean, we actually, there's a big shopping center called Churchill Square in Brighton, and we went and recruited a load of random people that fitted our demographics. So we were looking for, um, males between the ages of 16 and 25, and we just went out and got a load of them, got their, um, got their contact details, and then arranged for them to come and play our game. Yeah, and we sat with, we put them in a glass office and stayed on the outside, pretty low-tech, and just watched them, watched them as they played and directed and tried not to give them too much feedback. So there are definitely analog, where analog equivalents to the digital methods that we use. Yep. Yep.
Well, I think it's just really about keeping it really simple and low cost as much as you can because, you know, again, if you're starting out, if you're just a sole trader, you know, this is your idea to a small company, just thinking about the data that you're collecting, or any data can be good data, but having an idea about what you want to find out, yeah, as well. And it can be just as simple as getting a clipboard with some simple questions, asking people to write on a comments on a sheet. Go, if you're a product like a food retail or something, go into your farmers' markets, getting real-time information from watching people's reactions, asking them directly what they think. But the, the thing is, just keeping it really simple and as low cost as you can.
So I think that was going to be my next question is, how, how do you know what data to capture? How do you capture it? As you've done some of this, haven't you? Yeah, yeah. So what we did when we first started out was we just approached hospitals who weren't really affiliated with us anyway whatsoever. We just asked them, uh, would you mind if we observe and sat in with some of you and your patients to learn about what you do and how you work? And most people are happy to do that if you give them a real reason and tell them that it's ultimately going to, you know, solve a problem or, you know, benefit them in one way or another. And yeah, we sat with hospital users, we sat with patients, we observed, and we took notes. And all this data really was so helpful. And the clear thing that you're trying to get, the clear, you're trying to stay honest, right? You're trying to figure out, make sure that what you're making is not just your opinion based on your opinion, it's based on what people really want. Yeah. Apps, because that's, that's the key, that's the key with all business, isn't it? You're serving a customer need, and you need to make sure that it's done in the right way, or is this, it's genuinely their need, not what you think it's going to be. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really the key. That's what, that's what, you know, it doesn't really matter what the, what the method is that you use, um, as long as it serves that purpose of making it so that it's not just down to you.
I think what's important for SMEs is first of all, they get out of the building, as you say. There's, they contact your customers. Two, that the testing phase doesn't last too long. What we're really looking for is rapid prototyping, rapid testing, and that iterative process. So you're bringing it back, but that you're designing with them. Often, what we do is maybe a first round of testing, we take the data back, and we think, "We've got it solved." You have to then bring them on the journey, exactly. And ensure that you have a set time. So maybe you decide, "Okay, look, we're going to test over an eight-week period, maybe with this number of customers." Otherwise, you stay in the testing phase forever, which is a very common process with SMEs, and you never get to market. You know, um, you know, famously, for example, I think it's not just SMEs, Innocent Drinks famously took their, um, drinks to a festival, didn't they? And they had two buckets. Two simple buckets. And the first bucket said, "Drink this." You know, if you like it, place it in this bucket. If you'd buy it, if you wouldn't buy it, place it in this bucket. And literally, I think they tried 10 festivals, and that's how the Innocent Drink brand was born. So it can be that simple. But I think it's what's important is that you have clear goals from the start, and you're very clear about the objectives, what is it you're actually trying to ascertain? And then making sure you have very clear brief in sessions so that you're continuously, you know, designing with the customer, but that the process doesn't take too long.
How do you measure social innovation? I always think, um, business entrepreneurs, they get very caught up with measuring social innovation. Charities, non-profits, development sectors, international NGOs have been doing this for years. Yeah, because it's what they do. Yeah. So if I was like an SME, an entrepreneur, I would tend to look at what the charities do. They have a very detailed and well-developed monitoring, evaluation, and learning system. So there's lots of what you call MEL officers, and they will break down, you know, the impact goals, the milestones. Obviously, why don't you have like monitoring, evaluation, and learning officers? So we're talking about capturing value. So that as you go on and you're looking at the impact of your enterprise or your product or service, you've obviously broken it down. Does it have an educational impact? Does it, are you trying to work with people in poverty? So therefore, have you reduced their kind of, or raised their kind of socio-economic positions? So you would put in a series of milestones, and you would measure them in the same way you would really assess, you know, any kind of projects. There's a clear, clear milestones, clear assessment, and you try to understand whether you have captured value there, whether you have, you know, made a positive social impact. Um, equally, within the banking system, finances, they have their own way, right now, of screening initiatives, products, and services, companies. As there's more of a drive into sustainability, so there's more companies focusing on driving positive social and environmental impact. It's the same, there's accounting that looks at how you measure the impact of social innovation initiatives. So I think the business sector is really quite blurry on this. But as we, you know, as the two worlds emerge, and we are focusing more on impact, there's a greater understanding here. Well, there's a, probably two deeper subjects to go into, but the conversions and convergence of things like triple bottom line reporting, ESG, environmental, social, governance reporting. There's a lot of activity at the moment going on around this. Yeah. And, you know, across sectors, across different sectors, across the accounting firms, across the banks, across oil and gas companies, across the world, everyone's trying to work out how do we go, step away from some of these pure financial metrics into looking at some of their non-financial metrics and things like impact and environmental footprint as well. So there's a growing relationship between value and purpose. Legal frameworks that have come in. There was a taxonomy introduced last year in 2021, which means there's, you know, almost a secret revolution going on in our financial systems. Um, so absolutely, the drive between, make an impact has hit the private sector. It's hit the corporate sector in a massive way, and it's trickling down to SMEs. Our own Chancellor has released, you know, kind of, uh, legal frameworks that mean all SMEs will have to disclose. So in terms of capturing value, it's actually massive. You can no longer just focus on profit, and you will have to, as a company, capture your own social and environmental either positive impact or the negative impact, which is in terms of capturing value of your company, is a massive wider issue which will lead to new innovations. Absolutely.
And what, what they're being captured to what end? What do you mean, to what end? In terms of you as a business? Yeah. So you as a business, um, obviously we're going into a much wider discussion here, but you as a business, you will have to capture the impact that you're having. So not why, because of legal legislation that's coming. I know you have to. Yeah, but what's the end? What's the end product? What's the end goal for the, for the business? For the business? So, well, as a business, ideally, some of your values are about driving positive social or environmental impact. So in terms of sustainability, so most companies right now have some sort of sustainability agenda for PR. No, sometimes they don't for PR purely, and that's the greenwashing aspect of doing this. But when we start talking about living authentically by your company values, living with profit with purpose, that kind of thing, and walking the line, you know, walking the talk, sort of thing, then I think that would be a distinguishing factor between those who survive and pay lip service to it now, and those who we see 10, 20 years down the track and are going on and really thinking deeply, and it's driving down to customer choice. Sure. But the legal frameworks at the governmental level, so our own Chancellor has just issued kind of a series of legislations that mean you as a company will have to disclose. So you will have a rating where you'll be measured. So for that, so that's like an enforcement metric. Exactly. But really, the gain is is customer choice. If you don't do this, you will, your customers will not come to you. And it's again, another, another piece of awareness.
How, how important is that to your target, target consumer? Coming back to kind of research and capturing value, that's where, that's why I was asking this, not that I just, not not just whether I disagree with it or not, it's more that what's the, you know, in the context of, in the context of capturing value, where is the value captured in that? So before, I would say like the CSR programs, that was absolutely about PR, CSR, corporate social responsibility. So that's where it was before. But now, because of climate change, because of the impact it's having in across every single sector, no, it's, it's beyond PR, I would say right now. No, it's kind of, it's customer choice. It's down to, it's down, if you don't, it's a cut, it's a, it's a non-tangible customer need, right? Because it, because if, if you, you can alienate your consumers with this, and also they can make, they can make a choice to to consume your products or service based on that, based on those results. And that, so that's, although the government are enforcing you to do it, and they may put measures in place, that's what you're kind of describing. The end goal is to is to out-compete your comp, your your competitors, is to beat your competitors at, um, at corporate responsibility, because because that way you're going to get more consumers, and you would therefore increase your revenues. And that, that's, but that just makes business sense, right?
What I've got to do is interject here because we're running out of time for this discussion. It's been a fantastic discussion, lively as well. Um, I'd just like to bring this back to our SMEs. There's going to be, they're going to be people who are just learning about the value, just finding out about value. There's going to be SMEs that are more established and need to get a better understanding of their value. I'd like to just go around and get some top tips from everyone. I'm going to start with you, Tanya.
Um, I would say in terms of your value, think about first your own mission and your own values as a company. Yeah. And that is really what's going to drive value for your customers, your stakeholders, potentially your investors in the future. And also think about the wider impact you're having as a company on the wider society. And potentially, if you're interested in scaling or going global, yeah, think about that as a company too. Great. Thanks, Tanya.
Yeah, I'd agree with a lot of what you've just said. It's all very much about setting your vision upfront and your goals and understanding what your users' goals are as well as your own goals as a business. And it's research, it's research, research, research, customer research, user research, uh, competitive research, marketplace research. Don't forget about social economic research. What's happening in the external environment? PESTLE is a very good way of analyzing your external environment. It stands for political, economic, social, technological, and legal aspects of analyzing an external environment. And also your internal environment as well. So what, what is driving your own employees? What are their goals? You know, what is their motivation? It's really important to communicate your vision and make sure everyone in your organization is on board to achieving that vision. It's so important, right? To research, in other words. Yes, more research.
Yeah, so taking those points on board and bring it back into how do you do it as a top tip? Keep it simple. Yeah. Just have some goals, specific goals around what kind of data you want to capture, what, what you measure, what matters to you as an organization. And that, and it doesn't have to be all bells and whistles, really complicated, sophisticated, expensive systems. It can, as I said, just be a clipboard at the farmer's market. Amazing. That's a really good point, Jason.
So I think rather than using the word goal, I think that probably a direct setting a rough, certain direction at the start is really important. And I think that being open to be very flat, to being flexible about what the, what goals you'd sort of choose on the way. Because as you, as you go on that journey in that direction, you'll discover through market, through market research, and, you know, speaking to consumers and doing experiments and iterating on products and, you know, the changing environment around you, there are going to be lots of different opportunities and lots of different potential directions to go into. And if you have a very firm direction, I'm going over here with this goal, um, you'll miss that, you'll miss the ability to be able to change. And I think that, co-along with constantly, constantly checking to make sure that you're meeting the customer's requirements and meeting that customer needs. I think you've got to be so, you've got to be constantly iterating on, are we doing the thing that will get us, get us, get us, well, if it's the most profit, or the most impact, the most, the most, uh, you know, come back to the personal goals, I suppose. That's that, that's something that's going to be always consistent.
To wrap things up, it's about being engaged with what motivates you and your target audience is doing research, simple capture, and then also having a goal, having a direction, and being flexible about the goal. Yeah. Perfect. That's fantastic. Thanks ever so much, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.
One of the key principles highlighting the discussion was alluded to by Jason from Hardball Games. He talks about the process of iteration, testing, change, and reflection. This is very closely mirrored by the build, measure, and learn cycle advocated by Eric Ries in his seminal book, The Lean Startup. Adopting this approach helps a business to innovate at pace and scale and capture value through the process of innovation. Another core principle that came out of the conversation, which again is closely linked to lean innovation, was the one to design solutions with the customer, not for the customer. Having the needs of your customer baked in to the process of capturing value means you have a far greater chance of success when it comes to launching a product or service. Their needs will be reflected in what's created, including addressing their core problems. One should have a laser focus on who you aim to serve and what values they have. One way in which our panel achieved this was through directly observing current customer behavior. If this isn't appropriate or indeed possible, then surveying or depth interviews with a small cohort of your target audience can reveal rich insight that can be used to develop new innovations and create greater value based on their needs. Steve Blank, the famed startup guru, echoed the panel when he talks about getting out of the building being essential to capturing value and innovating effectively. If you attempt to create value without engaging your customers, you might miss opportunities or build entirely the wrong thing, as it was based on incorrect assumptions. Validating your ideas through real-world engagement is key. Another benefit of doing so is that those people who engage in the process of creating your product or service can go on to be your first customers. After all, it is they who you've created value for and made a relationship with.
Adam from Definition Health expanded our view of where value can be captured. Whilst one's mind will invariably gravitate towards commercial value, Adam introduced further dimensions of value, namely: one, customer; two, efficiency; three, market value; four, risk reduction; and five, future value. An interesting suggestion that came up was rather than setting a goal once, you set a direction of travel. This more flexible approach allows for iteration in the design process and stops one from following a path that isn't in the interest of the customer just because it feels right, because the path towards the goal. I'll end with a good starting point. Raising the discussion, start with the vision and mission in mind and use this as the guiding light as to where value can be captured. Thanks for watching.
In our next episode, we'll delve into the important topic of sustainable innovation and how to align people, planet, and profit. Make sure you join the conversation with our business community by clicking on the discuss button found on the learning platform. Also, keep an eye out for the next Q&A session where our experts will be online and ready to answer your questions around capturing and measuring value.
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