Anthony W. Ulwick

Read this book to substantially improve your innovation toolbox and process. It shows you what to do (and what to avoid) in order to succeed.


Alex Osterwalder Founder, Strategyzer October, 2016
INTRODUCTION:
THE FAILURE THAT LED TO SUCCESS

INSPIRED BY FAILURE

Early in my career as a product engineer, I experienced the ultimate professional disappointment: for 18 months I put my heart and soul into creating a product that failed in the marketplace.

It was 1984, and I was part of the IBM PCjr development team. We were working on a product that was supposed to revolutionize home computing. In advance of its release, the Washington Post wrote, “the PCjr will quickly become the standard by which all other home computers are measured.” So you can imagine my surprise when, the day after we introduced the PCjr, I woke up to read the headlines in the Wall Street Journal declaring, “PCjr is a flop.”

I was shocked! As we learned over the next few months, they were right. It was a flop, an embarrassment that cost IBM over a billion dollars and put a blemish on its reputation.

The humiliation of failure had a profound effect on me. I was determined to never let that happen again. In the weeks that followed I wondered how the Wall Street Journal had been able to see this correctly, and so quickly. It occurred to me that if we knew what metrics they (and potential customers) were going to use to judge the value of our product well before we introduced it, we would have the

opportunity to design our product to address those metrics and achieve a positive result.

This set me on a mission: I wanted to figure out a way to identify the metrics that customers use to judge the value of newly released products early on in the product planning process.