How do we navigate in a world without landmarks? We create them. With the rise of mass production businesses turned to psychologists and statisticians to quantify consumer behavior through surveys. Innovators, like sailors, bristled against the certitude of statistics. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” Henry Ford noted, “they would have said faster horses.”
In the last article I explored why noncustomers are the fountainhead of the plausible impossible. Yet we must navigate deeper. What makes great innovators great is their ability to connect insights hidden in plain sight. Steve Jobs described this process best when he famously said, innovation is just connecting the dots. Similarly, Richard Branson uses the mantra of "A-B-C-D" - Always Be Connecting the Dots.
Your noncustomers may not be thinking of you, but you should be thinking of your noncustomers. So often the most obvious, important and profound realities are the ones that are hardest to see. Today, the ability to spot, decode and connect the little things that customers and competitors take for granted are the overwhelming driver of competitive advantage.
