Customers can only imagine improvements to existing products, not entirely new ones. A 1950s eyeglass survey would suggest plastic lenses or scratch-proof coatings, never contact lenses or laser eye surgery. Radical innovation requires looking beyond what customers ask for.
Chapters
Customers are very poor indicating radical innovation. Customers don't know what they don't know. So if you want radical innovation, you don't start by asking customers, you start somewhere else. So for example, say you'd done a survey, say you'd been making spectacles in the 1950s and you'd done a survey of 10,000 customers and you said, how can we make our spectacles better? Our product or service, they might say, well, plastic lenses instead of glass lenses, they'd be good. A scratch-proof lens, that would be good. A flexible frame, that would be good. A really softer bridge, that would be good. Different styles, they'd be good. What would they not have asked you for? I want you to invent a piece of glass that I stick on my eyeball every morning, please. How many customers would ask for that? None. Not one. What else would the customers not have asked for? Laser. I want you to cut through my eyeball with laser beams, please, to change the geometry of my eyeball. How many customers would have asked for that? None. Not one. So customers are very poor at indicating radical innovation. In fact, you talk about sales challenge, imagine selling the first laser eye treatment, you know, to somebody. How difficult was that a sale? We've tried it on animals. It works. We'd like to try it on you, sir. We're going to cut through you. We'll put you under. We'll cut through. We'll change. And you'll be able to see much better afterwards, we think. Who's going to go for that? It's incredible. Anyway, so customers will tell you incremental innovation, improvement. They won't tell you radical innovation. Thank you.
