BQF Innovation

I went for a walk in the park today and noticed that most of the people who were walking their dogs were using ball throwers.  We had a dog for many years and in all that time I threw balls and sticks for it and was never aware of any need for a ball thrower.  I guess that if you had asked 1000 dog owners what problems or needs they had in relation to their dog they would have come up with a 100 things before anyone thought of a ball thrower.  Yet now every other dog owner has one.  When anyone can throw a ball why does everyone need one?   Well they do offer some benefits.  They allow you to pick up the ball without getting your hand dirty.  You can flick the ball further than with an overarm throw.  And many women seem to find throwing a little challenging so they are convenient.  This inexpensive product is exploiting a need that most customers did not know they had.  The same goes for many other products and services.

How can you anticipate needs that customer surveys cannot reveal?  The best ways are by watching users and seeing what they do and what problems or difficulties they encounter.  How can you make every stage of the process easier for them?  Whether it is walking a dog or outsourcing the building of a nuclear power station there are always ways to make things easier.  In 10 years time we will all be using goods and services that no-one has thought of yet.  Just like the ball thrower for dog walkers.

Paul Sloane

Customers can be an important source of innovative ideas.  Many companies conduct conventional customer surveys and focus groups.  These are useful channels of feedback but in terms of original ideas they are often disappointing.  Customers are good at demanding incremental improvements in products, lower prices and better service but they are notoriously poor at predicting significant new products or innovations to meet their needs.  Before the fax machine was invented who would have predicted he needed it?  Which wearer of spectacles in the 1950s would have said that he wanted a lens to put on his eyeball or laser surgery to reshape his eye?  You can expect customers to tell you that they want more of what you offer and they want it better, faster and cheaper.  But do not count on them to tell you about different ways to meet their needs.

A more lateral approach to gain insights from customers is to study in detail how they use your type of product or service and to observe what practical problems they have.

Fluke Corporation of Seattle is noted for innovative hand-held measurement products.  They sent teams of observers to watch maintenance engineers in chemical plants.  They discovered that the engineers had to carry a variety of different instruments to calibrate different temperature and pressure gauges.  They also noticed that after taking the calibration measurement the engineer would write the readings on a clipboard and then transcribe them into a computer.  The process was time-consuming and prone to errors.  Fluke therefore designed a new product that used flexible software to allow it to calibrate any gauge in the chemical plant.  It also recorded the results, which could be directly downloaded to the engineer’s computer.  The resulting product was the Fluke Document Process Calibrator, which became a great success.

Haier is a leading Chinese manufacturer of white goods such as freezers and cookers.  Its engineers in rural China were surprised to find that people were using Haier washing machines to wash the vegetables they had grown in their gardens.  Turning this unexpected use into a new application, the Haier development team came up with a new wash cycle designed specifically for vegetables.  On another occasion a sharp-eyed engineer saw that a student had placed a plank between two Haier fridges to form a makeshift desk.  The company responded by designing a fridge with a fold-out desktop - ideal for small rooms that need an extra table or desk top.

Asking customers for feedback is good but observing them can be much better.  If you want to gain a march on the competition and design the products and services of the future watch your customers carefully.  Look for the areas of unexpected use, the headaches and problems that want to be solved or the unusual combinations of needs or uses.  They can give you the insights you need to generate successful innovations in products, services and processes.