Is there agreement in your company that innovation is the key to growth? Is there agreement that understanding customer needs is the key to success in innovation? Is there agreement on what a customer need is? We have asked this series of questions to people in hundreds of companies, and in doing so have made a surprising discovery. Even though there is broad agreement that innovation is the key to growth and that understanding customer needs is the key to innovation, not even 5% of the companies said there was agreement within their company as to what a customer need is. This suggests a very disconcerting question: How can a company confidently uncover customer needs, determine which are unmet and systematically create products that address them if it cannot agree on what a customer need is to begin with? The answer is it can’t — and this is a root cause of failure in the innovation process.

Most companies already understand that there are four basic approaches to product and service innovation: growing core markets, capitalizing on adjacent market opportunities, discovering new markets and disrupting existing markets. But when it comes to understanding customer needs, voice-of-the-customer programs are undermined in two ways. First, there is no consistent standard that defines just what a “need” is... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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