Increasing the number of innovations that a company is able to produce is of no use if after a while those innovations fail and do not become commercial successes. The way to innovate successfully is to ensure that we innovate on things that are relevant to people (not just existing customers). This, which is of the purest common sense, however, is rarely applied correctly in companies. Why is this so? People come “equipped” with “beliefs”... These beliefs are like colored lenses, which filter images and do not allow us to see all of reality as it is. For example, if we look at a landscape through a green lens, we will barely be able to see the leaves of the trees and, therefore, we may come to think that they don't exist... just because we are unable to see them. Life in general appears to us like this: we continuously look at it through different lenses (which have generally been “given” to us in our childhood) and that make us see the world not as it is but as we “think” it is. This continuously leads us to errors. Unintentional errors but mistakes at last. Mistakes that lead us to not necessarily apply common sense to everything we do. To innovate on what is truly relevant to people (and not what we “think” is relevant), we must succeed in abstracting ourselves from our beliefs and focusing on what is truly relevant to people. For this purpose, there is a simple technique that is based on two pillars:
- The concept of “work to be done”.
- The systematic investigation of the “work to be done”.
We say that people, in general, have “jobs to do” for which they “rent” products or services that help them to do those jobs more easily. Innovating on work that people don't need to do is the first of the biggest mistakes in innovation. This is the main reason why countless technological innovations fail. There simply aren't enough people who have “jobs to do” that these new products are designed to do. On the contrary, the products that were created to “facilitate” “work to be done” that did exist and that many people needed to do, have enjoyed great and lasting successes. Examples of this are:
- Crest toothpaste: Preventing tooth decay.
- Federal Express: Ship something between two points as quickly and securely as possible.
- eBay: Auction a product.
- Kodak Fun Saver: Take photos even if you've forgotten your camera.
However, once you have found the “work to do” that many people need to do, you have to be able to find where in the entire process involved doing that work it is necessary and possible to innovate to achieve great success. There is a simple technique to do this, which consists of “segmenting” the “work to be done” and individualizing the “result” of the part of the process where there are two simultaneous conditions: firstly, it is where it is most important to obtain a good result and secondly, it is where people are most dissatisfied. By following these two simple recommendations, companies can significantly increase the ratio between the number of innovations they produce and those that become great successes.
