Where do innovations come from? Do consumers play a vital role in fostering innovation within companies? There are two interesting articles trying to answer those questions. The first comes from the Fast Company blog and is titled “Innovation: Start with the Customer?”. The second, “The Role of Customer Feedback in Innovation”, comes from the Emergence Marketing blog.
One of the articles states that “there are two opposing views on the role of the customer in innovation. One school holds that all innovations start with conversation, observation, and understanding of the customer (current or potential) with the goal of surfacing and then filling an unmet need. The other school says that customers don’t know what they need, at least until they see it, and sometimes a need doesn’t even exist until a solution is available to fill it. There are compelling arguments for both positions, and both have their advocates”.
In my opinion those two theories are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. Innovations do start with the observation and understanding of customer needs, and the fact that customers will not always know what they need until they see it will only reinforce the idea that a company needs to “observe” the customers and not “ask directly” to them.
As I wrote some time ago companies can not create needs out of nothing, and the Walkman innovation illustrates the point. Before the appearance of such device people were used to the idea that listening to music would involve sitting in their living room, and they accepted that constraint because the alternative would be not listening to music at all. If a market research was conducted by that time with people that had a stereo music system in their house it is very probable that none of them would mention an interest or a need for a portable music system. The users would not be able to articulate the values of “music” and “mobility” together, and they did not know what technology was capable of by that time. Sony did not created the need, but managed to understand and address it, and the rest is history.
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