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.”
Firms must shift their focus from giving customers what they want, to giving them something much better. To suggest that there is a formulaic path to creating “breakthrough value” is absurd. But to propose that we can create an approach that turns value proposition design into more of a puzzle than a mystery is a very real one.
