Understanding of your customer needs is not enough for discovery of disruptive innovation
Even for the best product, it is difficult to achieve a competitive advantage in the long term. Great value propositions should therefore be embedded in every business model.
A successful business model will achieve better results, will be more difficult to copy and outperform with market competition. The well known approach, where you are collecting customer needs does not have to immediately mean that you have a new playground with empty nets for your successful product. In order to discover disruptive innovation a more deep and complex methodology is needed.
When planning customers research, do not follow the traditional “voice of the customer” process. Unfortunately, when you ask your customer what they need next, you rarely uncover new innovative ideas. Humans are highly adaptable and may not realize they have a problem, let alone articulate a solution. Your customers don’t know what they don’t know. Commit to soliciting (and balancing) the input from both internal and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders include company execs, R&D, marketing, sales, customer support, etc. External stakeholders include purchasing agents, users, installation, service, maintenance personnel, etc.
At the beginning of the development of your product idea, you should consider starting by collecting ideas from your internal team and your existing customers. You might look at your existing products or collections and see which ones are ready for a refresh. While these approaches may help you uncover some useful product ideas, they will most likely deliver only small incremental improvements to your company’s bottom line. If you are looking for more than incremental improvements, you need to select a different approach. Rather than just asking customers what they want and what your team thinks they can do, a better approach is to investigate the “gap” that exists between existing customers' (usual) jobs and the new jobs improved with your innovative ideas. This is a “target-rich environment” for opportunities that can provide your company sustainable growth and true innovation business model.
Solution for your problem with discovery of your new product idea lies in the Job-To-Be-Done Framework, which maps the most usual customer jobs with your product and analyzes customer behavior. While standard marketing focuses on segment demographics or product features, Jobs Theory goes beyond superficial categories to expose the functional, social, and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. People don’t simply buy products or services; they pull them into their lives and expect some improvements with their standard jobs. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and understanding this opens a world of innovation possibilities.
At Pureinn, we are deeply inspired by Jobs-to-be-done methodology, which we are using in our product consulting services and we are always extending the standard mapping of customer needs with research of your customer behavior.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
