Luke Hohmann’s Blog

One of recent business books that has gotten a lot of press is Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The favorable press is well-deserved, and in looking over my copy of the book I see many, many dog-eared pages. I know that I’ll be referencing it quite a bit.

The most important aspect of the book is the focus on value innovation. Kim and Mauborgne recommend that to create value innovations you have to focus on the user. This phrase, or variants thereof, are all over the book. Indeed, they devote a signficant portion of Chapter 8 encouraging executives to directly interact with users.

This is a perfect opportunity for Innovation Games. Using Innovation Games, you can get close your customers, understanding their needs on their terms. This is the cornerstone of value innovation.

Scott Gilbert and I just spent a some time trying to pick the best time frame for our next Customer Appreciation Day. Our first one was held Sep 23, 2005, and we were thinking that another time of year would be better.

As it turns out, this isn’t that easy. There are a lot of events and conferences during the year, and you don’t want to clash with a conference that you know your customers are going to attend. Picking dates at the end of a quarter are difficult because of end of year financial cycles. Picking a date that clashes with a holiday like Thanksgiving or Memorial Day is a non-starter. Then, you have to be careful of your own family events, like birthdays. And there is no way to pick something that works for everyone, so you have to accept that you’re doing your best.

We decided that for now the middle of September is still the best choice. We may change it, in the future. The experience, though, was helpful, in that it gave us another chance to consider the world through from the perspective of our customer.

On Wed Nov 16th Enthiosys helped plan and run the SDForum event The Foundation of Innovation at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA. We played our Product Box^SM game, and it was a great success. I’ll be posting a few things about this event, and I thought I’d start with an observation that the keynote speaker, Bob Sutton, made regarding innovation. He pointed out, (as did the panelists), that true innovations rarely come from asking customers what they want. He even added the (famous?) Henry Ford quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Well, Duh.

The danger of this kind of comment and the quote from Henry Ford is that it perpetuates the myth that innovation is somehow uninvolved or disassociated with customers. In these models, you’re supposed to be somehow smarter than your customers, swoop down, and save the day.

I don’t think it works like that.

Instead, I think that innovation occurs from a deep understanding of your customers — their problems, their needs, expressed or unexpressed. Suppose that Henry had asked a customer “What do you want” and the customer has answered “I want a faster horse”. I’m willing to bet that Henry, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, would have explored this a bit further, perhaps using the 5-Why’s approach to root cause analysis.

Henry: “Why do you want a faster horse?”
Customer: “So I can get to the store in less time.”
Henry: “Why do you want to get to the store faster?”
Customer: “So I can get more work done at the farm.”

Oh. So the customer didn’t want a faster horse. And you didn’t even need five questions to find out what they did want. They wanted to get more work done. And presumably the car that Henry created provided that benefit.

Net? Don’t let pithy quotes let you fool yourself into thinking that you don’t have to understand your customers. You do.

Check out www.box4blox.com — looks like a cool way to store Lego, and if you’ve seen our house, I need it!

Dr. Michael Treacy, Chief Strategist of GEN3 Partners, blatantly mischaracterized the purpose and value of “Voice of the Customer” market research at the 2005 PDMA National Conference Innovation in Product Development. Dr. Treacy stessed that you should “ignore” the Voice of the Customer, because no truly innovative idea has ever come from a customer.

Huh? Ignore market research? Customers are not innovative? What nonsense is this?

The point of market research is to help you understand your customer. There are many market research techniques. One class of techniques is generally referred to as the Voice of the Customer. I’ll say it again, because apparently it needs repeating: you don’t use these techniques to get innovations. You use them to better understand your customer — their problems, on their terms. Then, armed with this understanding, you can work to create the innovations they may not even know they are seeking.

As for the claim that no truly innovative idea has ever come from a customer? Controversial statements such as these may create keynotes that help you promote your own brand of consulting services (that apparently are designed to ignore the Voice of the Customer?) but fail to capture the genuine capacity for innovation that exists in today’s markets. To learn more, read this: Customer Made.