Offer ideation
Diverge before you converge. The machine's gift is width; the cull is yours.
Innovation, in the method, does not mean inventing a product. It means offer innovation: a new way to create value for a specific customer, assembled from things you can already do. Offer ideation is the phase that finds it, and the rule is diverge before you converge. Generate wide, using structured prompts such as the five sources of value, and only then converge hard, against the two conditions of competitive edge.
AI has changed the first half and not the second. A Wharton study found that thirty-five of the top forty ideas in a comparison were machine-made, and the same study found that an unprompted model clusters around the obvious. The width is the machine’s gift. The cull is yours, because the cull needs to know this customer, this account team and what your business will actually deliver, which is the part no model has been in the room for.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapters 4 and 6.
Related terms
The five sources of value
Bottom line, top line, reputation, strategy and organisation, and the end consumer. Everything above the discount, which is transfer, not creation.
Competitive edge
Two conditions, both required: you add measurable value to the customer, and the customer sees you as better value than the alternatives.
The three registers
Productive, creative, collaborative: three different jobs AI can do for an account team. Not a maturity ladder, and the collaborative one needs an expert in the loop.
Offer Development and Innovation (ODI)
The capability to repeatedly create propositions a competitor cannot copy. Three phases: needs analysis, offer ideation, value proposition.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.