Tell me what you want, what you really really want

In our pursuit of innovation and bringing value-add to our clients, we find ourselves asking our customers "What do you want? What enhancements would you rather we spend our time on?"

So they tell us. and we build it... was that innovative?

Anthony Ulwick says in a Harvard Business Review article titled Turn Customer Input into Innovation, that when you ask a customer what they want, they end up describing solutions - products or features, out of what they've experienced before. They can’t imagine what they don’t know about new technologies. So they end up suggesting things other vendors already offer, and thus you end up with the "me-too" products or incremental enhancement that others can do as well. So, you didn't get rid of competition, and you're not really that innovative if you're giving them what others can give.


Anthony gives a five-step plan (and much more) to turning customer input into innovation, but the nugget behind it is translating the customer/interviewee's solution statements into outcomes—by asking why customers want the stated solutions.

Along the way, you end up collecting information about what the customer truly wants.

It's not the "extra fields to save and view customer inquiries" (solution), rather it's "provide quick turnaround for customer inquiries", for example. When the customers go ahead and rate each outcome based on importance and satisfaction, you have a much better chance at innovating, because now you know what they really really want..