“This I Believe: Aggressive and structured innovation management is a survival skill.” - GSS X

“This I Believe: Aggressive and structured innovation management is a personal, corporate and cultural survival skill.”

By: Christopher W. Miller, Ph.D. – CEO & Founder – Innovation Focus



I believe that the skills necessary to understand, interpret and communicate compelling customer needs in a way that can excite action from organizations has never been more important:

• Customer centricity; the customer owns all the cards, always makes the best possible decision from their perspective and we must approach them with unconditional positive regard
• Strategy driven; the purpose of strategy is to align the organization, its people and resources against current and future customer expectation
• Cross-functional approach; within discipline thinking is dead. There can be no closed doors - across technologies, business models and markets the source of solution finding must be unrestricted
• Process driven, measured and improved; those of us who know how to play the innovation game win 60% to 73% of the time. We are very good and need to get better

This I Believe: Aggressive and structured innovation management is a personal, corporate and cultural survival skill.

About Chris
Christopher W. Miller, Ph.D., NPDP

Founder, Innovation Focus & LIFEbytes Online
Past President the Product Development and Management Association
Instructor, ISBM, Penn State Smeal School of Business, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner


Chris’s primary focus is to inspire deep customer understanding and meaningful innovation.  Chris’s User Centered Design and Focused Innovation approach is documented in dozens of significant articles, chapters, manuals, and workbooks. Chris has been recognized for his series of Growth Forum articles for the PDMA publication Visions.  He has written for Food Engineering, Concurrent Engineering, Project Management Monthly, Food Technology Intelligence and The Journal of Product and Innovation Management. He is a co-author of Creating the Customer Connection: Anthropological/Ethnographic Needs Discovery, Chapter 8 in The PDMA Tool Book to be published by Wiley.