100 GREAT BUSINESS IDEAS • 205In practice
Underpinning value innovation is the ability to redefi ne a business
strategy based on an understanding of customers.
-^ Work at dramatically improving everything you offer the customer:
product, service, and delivery.
-^ Challenge and overcome industry assumptions. Understand what
these assumptions are and how the situation can be improved
for customers.
-^ Adopt a questioning approach. Why do customers buy? What
would they really value? Why do they want this? How does this
purchase relate to their other priorities?
-^ Be ambitious. Monitoring competitors is good, but avoid the
trap of competing with them on their (or the industry’s) terms.
Concentrate on doing something different and valuable for the
customer. Aim high, and competitive strength will follow.
-^ Avoid segmentation. While many people insist segmentation
provides greater understanding of customers, enabling them
to be served better, value innovators build scale by focusing on
the features that unite customers. This is the key to profi tability:
appealing to suffi cient numbers of people and achieving scale.
-^ Do not be constrained by existing resources. The question is not
what you can do with current assets and capabilities, but what
resources you should develop to serve your customers.
-^ Think laterally. This involves cutting across traditional industry
divisions between product and service, and fi nding ways to
signifi cantly improve the offer to the customer.