"More Innovation Please" - Marketing
Innovation is nothing more than unique solutions to problems. The catch is that in order to develop the solution you must understand the problem.
Not understanding the problem can lead to Innovating for Innovation’s sake; and that is simply an exercise in corporate entertainment. For example, a friend of mine is being asked to head an Innovation team at a Fortune 500 company. It seems that marketing has come to product development and asked for some more Innovative products. Not a novel approach to ship the product. Not a novel way to use the product differently. Just a simply request for more Innovative products. The problem, as marketing is defining it, is that there are not enough Innovative products to sell.
By failing to identify a specific customer problem to solve what marketing is really doing is asking for hirer margin products to sell to the existing client base. They ask for this because they are responsible for generating more profit and they think that the best (easiest?) way to do this is to sell higher margin products to the folks that they already know.
There is only one flaw in this line of reasoning and it’s that the customer does not care about marketing not having enough cool products to sell. The customer cares about their own problems.
By ignoring the customer what you end up generating is a bunch of me too products that best meet the needs of the company – higher margin, existing supply chain, existing client base, existing manufacturing base – but not the customer. And by ignoring the customer you ensure that the customer will ignore you, leaving you with nothing to show for the Innovation effort.
Not understanding the problem can lead to Innovating for Innovation’s sake; and that is simply an exercise in corporate entertainment. For example, a friend of mine is being asked to head an Innovation team at a Fortune 500 company. It seems that marketing has come to product development and asked for some more Innovative products. Not a novel approach to ship the product. Not a novel way to use the product differently. Just a simply request for more Innovative products. The problem, as marketing is defining it, is that there are not enough Innovative products to sell.
By failing to identify a specific customer problem to solve what marketing is really doing is asking for hirer margin products to sell to the existing client base. They ask for this because they are responsible for generating more profit and they think that the best (easiest?) way to do this is to sell higher margin products to the folks that they already know.
There is only one flaw in this line of reasoning and it’s that the customer does not care about marketing not having enough cool products to sell. The customer cares about their own problems.
By ignoring the customer what you end up generating is a bunch of me too products that best meet the needs of the company – higher margin, existing supply chain, existing client base, existing manufacturing base – but not the customer. And by ignoring the customer you ensure that the customer will ignore you, leaving you with nothing to show for the Innovation effort.