stupid school.

[katster]

what the fuck is a 'value proposition of your innovation'?

I didn't learn a thing in 208. Absolute utter *waste* of my time.

Comments

[lirazel.livejournal.com]

It's bullshit, mostly. I've been asking people around here to define "value proposition" for me for the past two years, ever since it infected the business memespace.

It appears to mean, "Tell me what this idea you have will do for me." "Me", in this case, being whomever your innovation (innovation = new thingy) is supposed to benefit, directly or indirectly. Somewhere in there you should be able to tie either direct dollar value or indirect dollar or other value of some kind to the new idea.

Thus, one of my company's value props is, "Our software will reduce the time your engineers spend looking for already-designed components, increase the reuse of existing designs, and help make sure that new design work is really necessary." Since about a third of an engineer's time in a paper-based environment is spent looking for stuff, putting the engineering data on line reduces the time spend looking and increase the chance that the engineer will re-use a part that already exists. The probable direct results are:

1) Stuff gets done faster = lower cost, lower time to market.
2) The same amount of work is used in more products, making that work more valuable.
3) The engineers have time to make up waiwai new stuff (unlikely; time != innovation).
4) Most probably, the company will be able to lay off engineers, thus reducing headcount, increasing operating capital, and improving the CEO's chances of a huge bonus--but why bring that up?

Now, why that needs a fancy, bullshit name like "value proposition" is beyond me. Would you make a proposition that had no value? or negative value? Further, it's extremely difficult to predict the actual direct and indirect value of an innovation. Incremental tweaks to old ideas are much safer and more likely to win approval in the real business world, even if they produce next-to-no benefit.

But it is important to be able to state clearly why your grand new idea should be backed by other people (who may, in fact, stand to lose if it works), because what's obvious to you, from your weeks of obsessing over your New Idea Baby is not obvious to others. If you can back it up with stats, all the better. And if you have to talk to business-people, it helps to use their amorphous, well-nigh meaningless language.

My company uses a thing we call the Product First Roadmap to do this. We had a bunch of fairly cool software, but were having trouble once we got out of the engineering departments at our target customers, persuading executives that the software they choose matters. It starts out really simple: there are two main business values, growth and profitability. (If you grow, people will buy your stock, and if you're profitable, people will also buy your stock; the best companies do both.) There's about 7 main ways to get a business to grow, and about four ways to make a business profitable (one overlap). From these come strategies--plans to do one of these 10 things, and from the strategies come initiatives--stuff that people actually try to do. These initiatives can be sorted into one of seven groups. Depending on the group, we have software that can help with the initiative.

You would not believe how much people are falling all over themselves right now about how wonderful this all is. Every idea in it is old, but it's organized in a clear, straightforward, non-threatening way that just sneaks into the executive subconscious. So, the "value proposition" of the Product First roadmap is that it's helping us sell more software and making us look like we're really, really smart in front of people who normally won't speak to us.

Incidently, the one stat I quoted above (33% of engineering is looking for stuff) is so true in the paper world that the value of doing ANYTHING to get data on-line is better than doing nothing--even if the thing you try to do is really, really stupid. Like printing out Word files and scanning them back in, which is what Wang wanted to do in the 80s.

I just wish these people would have the courage of their own convictions and not hide behind buzzwords like "value proposition" that they don't really understand, most of them.