Value proposition, an old concept, is taking on new significance in today‘s innovation-driven environment. Business focus has shifted from developing many creative ideas to developing only those that will successfully flow through the product cycle and fulfill a customer need. The old approach resulted in less than a 10 percent success rate for concepts that started through the product cycle; this can no longer be tolerated. This new book on value propositions outlines a systematic approach to making an early evaluation of potential projects and programs so you can determine if they can add real value to your organization or its customers potentially saving you millions of dollars and months of valuable time. Focusing on the necessary data collection efforts, Maximizing Value Propositions to Increase Project Success Rates will help you identify easy opportunities for improvement and will guide you through the process of creating value propositions for the ideas that will drive the organization‘s future profits. It outlines a four-stage approach to creating value propositions and explains how to create effective value proposition documents. The book illustrates the role of the opportunity center in capturing new ideas, describes how to present value propositions to management, and includes an example of a new product value proposition. Detailing a method for continuous review of the improvement process, it will help you foster an entrepreneurial mind-set within your employees and encourage them to actively search and document value-adding ideas. Through the effective use of value propositions it is completely possible for your organization to increase the number of new products/services it offers to your customers by over 100 percent. It is not unusual for this to result in more than a 40 percent increase in profits per year. Adopting the approach outlined in the text for using value propositions can save your

The best time to stop a project that will not add value to the organization is before it starts. An effectively prepared value proposition will help you make these difficult decisions.—Dr. Ron Skeddle, former CEO of LOF, Inc., a Fortune 500 glass, plastics, and hydraulics company

H. James Harrington, Brett Trusko