New ideas must catch a customer's mood
Morgen Witzel | Wednesday, 16 July 2008
TEN years ago, Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, was a bestseller. Christensen showed how innovation could become a form of trap. Companies invest large amounts of time and money in innovation but then lack the ability to make their innovations viable commercially. The investment never yields a return. Meanwhile, other less innovative companies figure out how to capitalise on the opportunity and go on to make a fortune, leaving the original innovator languishing.
This new book, The Innovator's Guide to Growth, is not by Christensen but his stamp is all over it. He wrote the foreword, and three of the four authors are consultants with Innosight, the consulting firm he founded, while the fourth is an executive at Motorola. It can be assumed that the writers have his approval.
The book is meant to pick up where The Innovator's Dilemma left off. "The odds remain stacked against the growth-seeking innovator," the authors claim, "whether he or she is an entrepreneur or a manager inside a deep-pocketed incumbent. Most start-up companies ... fail. Most internal innovation effort delivers disappointing returns."
This book is billed as the solution to the problem: "Readers who heed this book's advice will meaningfully improve their ability to spot and seize opportunities for growth." Bold words, but does it deliver?
The initial signs are not good. The title is somewhat mundane and the introduction is disappointingly full of phrases such as "disruptive innovation as a key growth lever", which could mean almost anything.
Thereafter, though, the book rapidly becomes better. The authors argue that the most important driver of innovation is not technological change, but customer needs. One important chapter covers what they call "nonconsumers" -- people who are not buying or using existing products and technology. Not all nonconsumers could become consumers. Those who would never buy a product must be identified and set aside so that marketing effort is not wasted.
For the remainder of nonconsurners, the question niust then be asked: what holds them back? The authors identify four main classes of constraint: skills (people do not know how to use t the product); wealth (they canno afford it); access (they do not know where to buy it); and time (they do not have time to look for the product or to use it).
The Innovator's
Guide to Growth
Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfeld and ElizabethJ. Altman Harvard
Business Press $35
The task of the innovator is not to build a whizzy new product that will catch everyone's imagination but to find those barriers and break them down: in the authors' words, to "remove the constraints on consumption".
Another important task is to identify "overshot" customers those buying products that are more complex than they need. This renders the selling company vulnerable to any rival that comes along with a simpler, more functional product that offers the customer exactly what they want. To avoid overshooting, the authors say, companies must get closer to their customers and find out what they really need and then design accordingly. Could writers of software for PCs read this chapter carefully, please?
Likewise, it is important to understand what people do with products once they have purchased them. Often these are quite different from the purpose for which the products were designed. One study in the US some years ago identified more than 30 different unexpected uses for hairdryers, some of them potentially lethal, such as drying paint quickly. There was no product that could do the job, so people improvised with hairdryers. Identifying such gaps is an important task for the innovator.
The three chapters on identifying opportunities are the intellectual heart of the book. The rest, which discuss how to develop innovative ideas, set a strategy for innovation, build innovative teams, organise for innovation and so on, all form a useful reminder of how to do these things but will not be especially new to many readers. The case studies are frankly not much help: there are too few, and they lack detail.
So does the book keep its promise? Probably. By linking innovation explicitly to customer needs, and especially to constraints on consumption, factors that prevent customers from buying existing products, the authors have provided a model that should help companies spot and seize opportunities for growth. "Find out what the customer wants, then make it and sell it to them" is an old adage but one that often gets lost in the white heat of technological innovation and the pursuit of the new.
Under syndication arrangement
with FE
This new book, The Innovator's Guide to Growth, is not by Christensen but his stamp is all over it. He wrote the foreword, and three of the four authors are consultants with Innosight, the consulting firm he founded, while the fourth is an executive at Motorola. It can be assumed that the writers have his approval.
The book is meant to pick up where The Innovator's Dilemma left off. "The odds remain stacked against the growth-seeking innovator," the authors claim, "whether he or she is an entrepreneur or a manager inside a deep-pocketed incumbent. Most start-up companies ... fail. Most internal innovation effort delivers disappointing returns."
This book is billed as the solution to the problem: "Readers who heed this book's advice will meaningfully improve their ability to spot and seize opportunities for growth." Bold words, but does it deliver?
The initial signs are not good. The title is somewhat mundane and the introduction is disappointingly full of phrases such as "disruptive innovation as a key growth lever", which could mean almost anything.
Thereafter, though, the book rapidly becomes better. The authors argue that the most important driver of innovation is not technological change, but customer needs. One important chapter covers what they call "nonconsumers" -- people who are not buying or using existing products and technology. Not all nonconsumers could become consumers. Those who would never buy a product must be identified and set aside so that marketing effort is not wasted.
For the remainder of nonconsurners, the question niust then be asked: what holds them back? The authors identify four main classes of constraint: skills (people do not know how to use t the product); wealth (they canno afford it); access (they do not know where to buy it); and time (they do not have time to look for the product or to use it).
The Innovator's
Guide to Growth
Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfeld and ElizabethJ. Altman Harvard
Business Press $35
The task of the innovator is not to build a whizzy new product that will catch everyone's imagination but to find those barriers and break them down: in the authors' words, to "remove the constraints on consumption".
Another important task is to identify "overshot" customers those buying products that are more complex than they need. This renders the selling company vulnerable to any rival that comes along with a simpler, more functional product that offers the customer exactly what they want. To avoid overshooting, the authors say, companies must get closer to their customers and find out what they really need and then design accordingly. Could writers of software for PCs read this chapter carefully, please?
Likewise, it is important to understand what people do with products once they have purchased them. Often these are quite different from the purpose for which the products were designed. One study in the US some years ago identified more than 30 different unexpected uses for hairdryers, some of them potentially lethal, such as drying paint quickly. There was no product that could do the job, so people improvised with hairdryers. Identifying such gaps is an important task for the innovator.
The three chapters on identifying opportunities are the intellectual heart of the book. The rest, which discuss how to develop innovative ideas, set a strategy for innovation, build innovative teams, organise for innovation and so on, all form a useful reminder of how to do these things but will not be especially new to many readers. The case studies are frankly not much help: there are too few, and they lack detail.
So does the book keep its promise? Probably. By linking innovation explicitly to customer needs, and especially to constraints on consumption, factors that prevent customers from buying existing products, the authors have provided a model that should help companies spot and seize opportunities for growth. "Find out what the customer wants, then make it and sell it to them" is an old adage but one that often gets lost in the white heat of technological innovation and the pursuit of the new.
Under syndication arrangement
with FE