It's hard to ride with one foot in two different boats. Things are difficult and unstable at best.
So it is with companies that earnestly attempt to innovate. Everyone talks the talk, but walking the walk is where it all happens. Real innovators face a fundamental choice: whether to be primarily the proponents of their own creative ideas or the adapters/implementers of their customers' ideas.
In a guest post at Harvard Business Review's blog, author and professor Roberto Verganti eloquently contrasts user-centered innovation against the method followed by tech leaders like Apple who are known for their innovation. Citing the hoopla around the iPad launch as an example, he writes,
"This [anticipation of iPad] was validation of Apple's peculiar innovation process:
Insights do not move from users to Apple but the other way around. More
than Apple listening to us, it's us who listen to Apple."
Verganti argues that "firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision." This is the proactive approach. Apple builds something, THEN we react. User-centered innovation, the kind that is highly favored today by start-up founders, tech entrepreneurs and especially their investors, is reactive, he contends.
The author of Design-Driven Innovation, Verganti concludes that proactive innovators (like Apple) that follow a collaborative innovation strategy are better at developing radically new
innovations, while reactive, user-centered innovators are better at
incremental improvements.
For proactives the downside is higher risk of failure but the upside is a greater chance of having a much bigger success. For reactives, the downside is lower chance of hitting it big while the upside is a higher probability of success, albeit a relatively smaller one.
If he's right, the somewhat surprising upshot is that the user-centric approach that's dominant now, involving staying close to your customers and listening intently to their feedback, is not the best path to radical innovation or market disruption. It is a road that leads to smaller, incremental improvements and lesser innovations. That would come as a surprise to customer-led innovation experts such as Patty Seybold, who argue fervently in favor of customer co-design and customer-led innovation and have built strong consulting practices around it. Seybold says "when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models," it's "Outside Innovation," which is the focus and title of her latest book.
Verganti is not the first to point out that customers seldom ask for radical innovations. Users at some level always have at least a small vested interest in the inertia of whatever they've been doing. But he may be the first to suggest that giving customer input too much weight might hold you back.
Are you talking about game-changing innovation while delivering 2-1/2% enhancements ... because "that's what they want?" You may talk disruption--but are you swinging for the fences, or settling for singles?
Organizations that seek genuine innovation are balancing on a knife edge. Like a skateboarder on a handrail, you cannot tilt toward both sides at once. You have to choose. Regardless of which path you take, you must somehow strike a balance between leading your customers with your ideas or following theirs.
