clair075

In my Twitter stream yesterday I found this nice article by Michael Schrage entitled Embrace your ignorance .  His slightly provocative title is meant to signal that perhaps you live in a self-satisfied bubble of assumed intelligence and knowledge about your customer, when in fact you should be happy to be humble about your ignorance, and act accordingly. Schrage goes on to extol the values of experimentation and "big data" as methods to discover what customers really want, but here he loses me a bit.  I'd rather go back to an even simpler way of discovering needs, by asking and observing in real time where the real opportunities and pains exist, or where actual solutions fall short or have gaps.  Ethnography, getting close to the customer and their use of a solution or their experience, is what indicates where the opportunities and problems lie.  From those observations we can extrapolate and create potential solutions, which can become the basis for experiments, wh...

The title of this post is a bit provocative, and that's on purpose.  Every company wants to innovate, and further they desire that the limited innovation they accomplish succeed wildly.  This is of course whistling past the graveyard, as most innovations, like most venture capital investments, won't return the initial investment.  Instead, most companies demand innovation results on par with the iPhone while funding innovation with the equivalent of corporate bake sales.  But this post isn't intended to deride the often inadequate resourcing of innovation, it's meant to point out the reasons behind a rather uncomfortable fact:  even good ideas often fail in the marketplace.  This skips right over the outright failure of bad ideas and bad products, of which there are legion.  Those probably deserve to die an ignominious death.  But why do good ideas and products seem to have such a high failure rate? There are plenty of reasons for good, innovative...