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The article explores the leadership strategies of a CEO who defied the odds against culture change and accomplished a storied turnaround, Curt Carlson who introduced a culture of innovation at SRI International.

Under Carlson’s leadership, SRI developed a methodology for rapid, large-scale, serial innovation, starting with a focus on important customer and market needs. The innovation proposals had to develop compelling hypotheses for both the product offering and the business model.

Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC). the methodology Carlson and his team developed, contains the fundamental framework for creating customer value, it applies to the entire enterprise. It brings all functions together using a short, easy to remember meme that starts every conversation with a focus on customer need.

One of the most spectacular and best-known SRI innovation wins was Siri, the intelligent personal computer assistant and on-line knowledge navigator, an integral part of the iPhone. As a case example, Siri illustrates the power of the NABC approach.

Carlson stresses that the key element in SRI’s success with Siri was not just the technology. It was getting the entire value proposition right. “One of the things that changed at SRI was the realization that we needed to have really solid working hypotheses, both for the product and the business model, before we started spending significant money on technology. That’s one of the biggest mistakes firms make. They rush ahead and want to build the product before they de-risk their value propositions.

Describes how Agile teams can use strategic management tools and processes to discover market-creating innovations.

The related article “The next frontier for Agile: strategic management” in the previous issue of Strategy & Leadership explored the theory and possibilities of enterprise-wide Strategic Agility, a combination of Agile mindset and processes with strategic management theory to produce continuous market-creating innovation. This second installment offers insights from noted practitioners about implementing it.

The strategic concepts of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Clayton Christensen’s Job to Be Done theory and Curt Carlson’s SRI Playbook – Need, Approach, Benefits per costs and Competition (NABC) can be adopted by Agile teams seeking innovations that create new customer value.

Identifying a well-defined Job to Be Done produces the start of an innovation blueprint which is unlike the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because of the much higher degree of specificity required to identify precisely what problem your potential solution would address.

Using strategic management concepts, Agile teams can redefine how needs are being met and in the process, discover value for customers from offering something or doing something that the company or the industry currently doesn’t provide.