Chapter 20 — Resources

Where Value Lives • Chapter 20 Companion

Innovation With the Customer, Not At the Customer

Strategic innovation begins in the customer’s world. It connects possibility to context, tests ideas through evidence and creates change the customer can recognise.

Welcome to the Chapter 20 Companion Page

Innovation has been attached to so many strategy decks, workshops, laboratories and photographs of people looking thoughtfully at glass boards that the word is in danger of losing its usefulness.

Yet innovation matters enormously in strategic relationships. A strategic account can become a partner in learning, experimentation and improvement — a place where customer and supplier create future value that neither could fully create alone.

The distinction is whether we innovate with the customer or merely at them. Supplier-led enthusiasm, unsupported novelty and impressive demonstrations may generate interest, but interest is not recognised value.

The customer does not need to admire our innovation. They need to recognise what became better because we worked together.

Fred’s Comments

Possibly With Pastries

Innovation theatre can look magnificent. There may be unusual chairs, fluorescent sticky notes, a lab tour, prototypes, futuristic language and somebody pointing at a dashboard with theatrical seriousness.

Then everyone goes back to work and nothing changes.

I have nothing against the energy created by a good workshop. I have even less against pastries. But neither is evidence that strategic value has been created.

The useful question is not, “What can we show the customer?” It is, “What can we help the customer change?” That takes us away from novelty for its own sake and back into the customer’s context.

Innovation may be dramatic, but it often is not. It may remove a delay, simplify an onboarding process, improve a dashboard, redesign a service recovery route, make value easier to prove internally or eliminate a needless meeting. Removing a needless meeting is practically a humanitarian act.

The strategic account manager does not need to be the most inventive person in the room. The role is to orchestrate the conditions in which useful innovation can emerge: the right context, stakeholders, questions, evidence, expertise and governance.

That means testing assumptions with the smallest meaningful experiment, involving the people who must adopt the change, gathering evidence the customer recognises and being willing to scale, adapt, pause or stop.

Innovation should leave the relationship smarter. Even an idea that does not scale can create value if it prevents a larger mistake, strengthens trust and improves future judgement.

— Fred

“Innovation is not defined by how exciting it sounds to the supplier. It is defined by what changes for the customer.” — Fred Mills, Where Value Lives

Key Takeaways

  • Strategic accounts can become partners in learning, experimentation and innovation rather than remaining sources of revenue alone.
  • Innovation should begin with what is changing in the customer’s world, not with the supplier’s product roadmap or latest capability.
  • Innovation theatre performs the appearance of innovation; strategic innovation creates change the customer recognises as valuable.
  • New is not automatically valuable, different is not automatically better and digital is not automatically strategic.
  • Quiet improvements can create substantial value by removing friction, delay, duplication, risk or needless work.
  • The SAM acts as an innovation orchestrator, connecting customer context with the right stakeholders, expertise, questions, evidence and governance.
  • Innovation must have a stakeholder home: people who care, benefit, approve, adopt, resist, measure and recognise the outcome.
  • A small experiment should be manageable but meaningful enough to test a real assumption and create useful evidence.
  • Adoption is where innovation becomes value. A brilliant idea that nobody uses remains theoretical.
  • Evidence turns possibility into confidence and gives innovation a passport to travel inside the customer organisation.
  • Governance gives innovation a cadence, ownership, evidence review and decision path. “Exciting” is not a status.
  • Scale, adapt, pause or stop according to recognised value, risk, readiness and mutual return — not enthusiasm.
  • Mutual learning should become relationship memory and update the living account plan.
  • AI can scale insight and experimentation, but human attention still supplies meaning, trust, judgement, empathy and responsibility.

Chapter 20 Download

Joint Innovation Value Loop Canvas

This 16-page executive implementation tool helps customer and supplier teams define, test, evidence, govern and learn from a joint innovation opportunity. It guides the team through customer context, value opportunity, stakeholder relevance, idea generation, feasibility and risk, a small experiment, evidence of change, customer recognition, the scale-or-stop decision and mutual learning.

It also includes an executive loop overview, evidence discipline, innovation governance record, mutual-value and commercial logic review, and a 90-day action summary.

Download the Joint Innovation Value Loop Canvas

PDF executive implementation tool • Primary supporting resource for Chapter 20 of Where Value Lives

Questions to Take Back to Your Organisation

  1. What is changing in the customer’s world that makes innovation relevant now?
  2. Where is value being lost, delayed or trapped?
  3. What would the customer want innovation to change?
  4. Can we state the opportunity in customer terms without mentioning our product?
  5. Which stakeholders would care, benefit, resist, approve, adopt or measure the change?
  6. Whose behaviour must change before value can be created?
  7. Are we bringing a relevant possibility or simply presenting the product roadmap in a party hat?
  8. What assumptions make the idea attractive, and which of them remain untested?
  9. What operational, technical, cultural, regulatory, adoption or commercial risks must become visible?
  10. What is the smallest useful experiment that could test a real assumption?
  11. What baseline or comparison point is needed?
  12. What evidence would the customer recognise as credible and meaningful?
  13. How will users and value beneficiaries influence the experiment?
  14. Who owns customer actions, supplier actions, evidence review and the final decision?
  15. What would justify scaling, adapting, pausing or stopping?
  16. What legitimate value should the customer and supplier each receive?
  17. How will learning update the account plan, stakeholder map and future investment choices?

Try This With AI

This prompt can help a joint team examine an innovation opportunity without allowing technology to replace customer evidence or human judgement. Remove confidential and personally identifiable information before using an external AI service. Keep people anonymised by role and require the AI to separate evidence from inference.

Act as a rigorous and ethical Strategic Account Management joint-innovation reviewer. Using ONLY the information I provide, help me test whether this innovation opportunity is relevant, feasible, evidence-led and capable of creating value the customer will recognise. CUSTOMER CONTEXT AND STRATEGIC PRIORITY: [Insert] VALUE CURRENTLY LOST, DELAYED OR TRAPPED: [Insert] DESIRED CUSTOMER CHANGE: [Insert] STAKEHOLDERS, USERS AND DECISION ROLES: [Insert anonymised roles where possible] IDEAS OR POSSIBLE ROUTES TO VALUE: [Insert] KNOWN CONSTRAINTS, ASSUMPTIONS AND RISKS: [Insert] PROPOSED SMALL EXPERIMENT: [Insert] BASELINE, MEASURES AND AVAILABLE EVIDENCE: [Insert] CUSTOMER AND SUPPLIER CONTRIBUTIONS: [Insert] GOVERNANCE, TIMING AND DECISION AUTHORITY: [Insert] For every material statement, classify it as: DIRECT EVIDENCE REASONABLE INFERENCE ASSUMPTION UNKNOWN Do not invent customer priorities, stakeholder opinions, user behaviour, adoption, risks, data, evidence, commercial value, commitment or agreement. Analyse the opportunity through the ten-stage Joint Innovation Value Loop: 1. CUSTOMER CONTEXT 2. VALUE OPPORTUNITY 3. STAKEHOLDER RELEVANCE 4. IDEA GENERATION 5. FEASIBILITY AND RISK 6. SMALL EXPERIMENT 7. EVIDENCE OF CHANGE 8. CUSTOMER RECOGNITION 9. SCALE, ADAPT, PAUSE OR STOP 10. MUTUAL LEARNING Then identify: A. The strongest connection to the customer’s strategic context. B. Where the idea may reflect supplier enthusiasm rather than customer relevance. C. Missing stakeholders, users or value beneficiaries. D. Assumptions that must be tested before significant investment. E. Adoption, operational, technical, cultural, regulatory and commercial risks. F. The smallest experiment that would be meaningful enough to teach. G. A credible baseline and the evidence the customer would recognise. H. How customer recognition may differ across users, operations, finance, executives and procurement. I. The legitimate mutual-value case for customer and supplier. J. The governance cadence, ownership and decision path required. Finish with: – a plain-language innovation opportunity statement; – the five highest-priority assumptions to test; – a proposed small experiment, including scope, participants and stop conditions; – an evidence plan separating leading and lagging measures; – the most important adoption actions; – a recommendation to EXPLORE, TEST, SCALE, ADAPT, PAUSE or STOP; – the reasons for that recommendation; – the learning that should be captured in the account plan; – a 90-day mutual action plan; – and an executive-sponsor briefing of no more than 250 words. Apply these final tests: “What became possible, better, clearer or more valuable because customer and supplier worked together?” “Would the customer recognise that change as valuable?”

Keep Exploring Where Value Lives

Innovation with the customer brings together context, stakeholders, value hypotheses, evidence, governance and mutual learning. It depends on useful human attention: noticing what is changing, interpreting what matters and deciding where scarce organisational effort should go.

But strategic account teams cannot rely forever on heroic individuals remembering everything, chasing everyone and holding the customer’s entire world together through caffeine and optimism.

Human attention creates meaning. AI can help scale it.

Chapter 21 explores Human Attention, AI Scale — and how modern SAM can combine technology’s reach and speed with human context, judgement, trust and responsibility.

← Back to Chapter 19 Continue to Chapter 21 →