An Innovation Mindset – “Should you listen to your customers?” Continued

Posted by Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM on January 28, 2009 in: Coaching, Just Blogging

Yesterday I talked about the tricky balance between the customer always being right and Henry Ford’s admission that if he had listened to people, he would have invented a faster horse.

Ford states it well and if I were to restate what he said I would put it a little more bluntly: the customer doesn’t really know what they need. I mean that customers know they need a solution to their problem or a fulfillment to their desire but they will solve that need with the best available solution. Thus, if Henry Ford had listened to the market, he would have given them a faster horse because horses were the available solution for getting around.

But Ford knew that the real need the market was experiencing was the need for easier, faster, (and less smelly?) transportation.

The same goes for Edison, too. He could have stuck with candles because the marketplace thought they needed candles. But he knew that what they really needed was light.

So, when you are thinking about innovating new products or services, stop thinking about augmenting existing solutions because that is what your customer is asking for. Instead, think about what their REAL need is and then create a solution that meets that true need.

Innovation is the key to all products and thought processes alike,

Heather Villa



-Heather Villa


Related posts:

  1. Should You Listen to Your Customers?
  2. What’s stopping you?
  3. A Great Innovation Strategy
  4. Business “best practice” in today’s economy
  5. The conundrum of committedness – part 3
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1 Comment

  • jrichard says:
    February 1, 2009 at 5:51 pm

    Good stuff.

    The question isn’t really “should you listen to your customers?”. It’s more “Should you listen to your customers for possible problems/desires to attempt to solve…. or should you listen to them for solutions?”

    The former will always be fruitful while the latter will only sometimes be of benefit… and often it’ll be a detriment since it’s more likely to be influenced by the closed-mindedness of the existing solutions already available. Or to not take the bigger picture into context.

    I encounter this a lot in essentially the same way, albeit a different context, when working with my (IT) consulting clients. They have a particular technical problem and often when I’m called in they already have a solution in mind, which may not be particularly effective at addressing the real underlying culprit, and the’ll ask me to implement it. I’ll often get everybody to step back, forget about the prematurely proposed solution, go back to reconsidering the true pains/desires, consider things in the context of higher level business requirements, and only then do we prescribe a solution.

    Thus:

    1) Listen to your prospective target market, existing customers, etc. to find out their problems, pains, needs, and desires. Recognize when they are trying to suggest solutions rather than problems. Take solution suggestions with a grain of salt.

    2) Come up with a good solution to one or more of these problems/desires.

    3) Consider getting some inspiration from the solutions suggested by customers but be careful not to get locked down in traditional thinking..

    Keep perspective like this is easy to miss but critical to innovation and break through thinking.

    -jr

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