txt Mapping Value: Find where value lives before you commit to a direction

Overview:
Most innovation is wasted, not because the ideas are poor but because the effort was aimed in the wrong direction before anyone measured it. Drawing on a million-strong solver network where 70 per cent of winning answers come from outside the problem's home field, Mapping Value is a five-step method for finding where value actually lives — before you commit.

The Book:
The most expensive decision in any project is usually made in the first ten minutes, by accident, by whoever happens to describe the problem first.

It never looks like a decision. Someone senior names the problem in a few confident sentences, the room nods, and a direction is set. Budget, hires and machinery all point one way. Years and millions later, someone notices the value was never going to be where everyone agreed to look — it was sitting in a discipline that wasn't in the room.

Simon Hill has spent two decades watching this happen. Through Innocentive, the open innovation marketplace he acquired in 2020, he has also watched what happens when problems escape their home field: across a community of more than a million solvers in 195 countries, roughly 70 per cent of winning solutions come from outside the discipline that owned the problem. Frozen crude oil that no pump could shift was cleared by a construction worker who knew how to keep concrete flowing. NASA's solar storm forecasts were transformed by a retired radio engineer.

Mapping Value turns that finding into a method. Five steps, a tool for each, and worked examples from NASA, Colgate, Goldcorp and Procter & Gamble:

• Reframe and bound the real need, so the problem can travel without travelling into nonsense
• Find where solutions could come from, looking hardest where it feels least comfortable
• Map the landscape, because value is a distribution, not a point
• Measure where value lives, scoring blind to the source
• Commit, hard, and hold the line

Most innovation is waste — not for want of ideas, but for want of aim. Map first. Then commit.