Customer needs and innovation

Is there agreement in your company that innovation is the key to growth? Is there agreement that understanding customer needs is the key to success in innovation? Is there agreement on what a customer need is? Innovation consulting firm Strategyn has asked this series of questions to people in hundreds of companies, and in doing so have made a surprising discovery. Even though there is broad agreement that innovation is the key to growth and that understanding customer needs is the key to innovation, not even 5% of the companies said there was agreement within their company as to what a customer need is. This suggests a very disconcerting question: How can a company confidently uncover customer needs, determine which are unmet and systematically create products that address them if it cannot agree on what a customer need is to begin with? The answer is it can’t — and this is a root cause of failure in the innovation process.

In a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, Strategyn CEO Anthony Ulwick and senior consultant Lance A. Bettencourt explored how to introduce a set of timeless standards that define the purpose, structure, content and format of a customer need statement and thereby transform the art of requirements gathering - and hence innovation - into a rules-based discipline. These standards, and the theory that supports them, are the result of Strategyn's analysis of over 10,000 customer need statements collected for products and services covering nearly every industry. These standards apply to any innovation strategies that a company might pursue and can benefit any company that wishes to bring predictability to the process of innovation.

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