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.”
You must obey the forces you want to command. Consider if you were tasked to make Theodore Levitt's proverbial 1/4 inch hole. But what if you had to create the tools to do so? First, you would have to obey the laws of physics and metallurgy to heat the wrought iron to the right temperature. Obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics…
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.
Buyers impatiently wait to be wowed as firms struggle to find new growth opportunities. Today “innovation” is a byword for distraction instead of a force for human advancement. And all signs point to a deepening innovation recession. Look at indicators from a 50% decline in entrepreneurship in the last 20 years; to a pop-culture tech backlash; to the fact that just 3% percent of newly financed product…
