Innovator's Playbook

2Discover

In stage one, you and your team defined the opportunity area you want to focus on and then crafted this into a customer-centric challenge statement. In stage two you’ll immerse yourselves in the world of the customer to explore this opportunity area from a customer lens to identify opportunities to improve people’s lives.

Here’s my recipe for disaster:

• Lock yourself in a garage, lab or some other secluded and isolated space and work solo, or as an insular team, for days, weeks, months or even years on some new bright idea!
• Focus on making sure it works technically!
• Make sure you don’t share your idea with anyone in case they copy it and launch it before you.
• Definitely do not test it with potential customers.
• Brief the media to launch it to the world for you.
• Tell them to talk about how innovative it is, how it will advance humankind, how it’s the biggest breakthrough since sliced bread, but don’t, no matter how persistent they are with their questions, tell them what it actually is. That’s your best chance of surprising the market.

Your innovation might be new and it will be sure to work, but will anyone want it? The answer is most likely no. Why, you ask? Because more startups and innovations fail from a lack of customers (desirability) than from a failure of the product or technology itself.

To increase your chances of success you need to start with the problem, not the solution, by uncovering true customer needs and insights. And not the sort made up in the ...