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.
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…
