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Innovation is based on the encounter between novelty and a market, which requires constantly connecting new product or service ideas to users expressing genuine needs. For this purpose, a customer-centered approach is essential, requiring empathy and analysis to avoid catering to imaginary needs of non-existent clients. Marketing plays a key role by listening to customers, observing their dysfunctional practices, or even envisioning ideal offerings for unconscious needs. Innovation also combines technical, developmental, and research approaches, but it is important not to be solely limited to the technical aspect, as a multidisciplinary team is often necessary for successful innovation. Ultimately, innovation requires both a mindset, a methodology, and effective implementation.
E. Krieger
Innovation is characterized by the encounter of novelty and a market. An authentic innovator is thus dedicated to constantly connecting, on one hand, ideas for new products or services, and on the other hand, users expressing a genuine need for an offering with tangible perceived value.
This « customer-oriented » approach is far from natural and requires a good amount of empathy and analytical capacity to avoid trying to satisfy phantom needs supposedly expressed by equally elusive customers.
Listening to the customer, observing them, or dreaming with them
This perspective, where the market takes precedence, gives prominence to approaches where marketing reigns supreme. From this point of view, the simplest approach is to listen to potential customers to allow them to express unsatisfied needs. The more people complain about the inadequacy of existing solutions to address a given need, the more you will have identified a need for which future customers are willing to pay. The analysis of a significant need is an essential prerequisite for formulating an offer capable of addressing it.
It is a little more challenging to detect needs unsatisfied by existing offers. The key in this case is to observe the customer to identify dysfunctional practices that a person or organization may not necessarily be able to describe in words.
An even bolder approach is to « dream with the customer » to build an ideal offer corresponding to unconscious needs. Such an approach goes beyond analytical thinking and allows for the creation of innovative solutions in close relation to the end-user. Design thinking clearly proceeds from this approach to collaborative innovation, which relies on both intuition and analysis.
Engineering, development, or research
Scientists and engineers may argue that marketing is not the alpha and omega of innovation. This is partly true for advanced technology companies, where some disruptive innovations are primarily attributable to the talent of a scientist or technical team.
By increasing degrees of uncertainty, tasks can be distinguished as follows:
- Engineering, consisting of using basic technologies to address a given problem.
- Development, where the challenge is to develop differentiating technologies by transferring and/or adapting existing know-how.
- Research, where the aim is to discover and experiment with emerging technologies.
However, approaches predominantly driven by technology run the risk of developing « solutions in search of a problem, » where the real usage of a particular technology is often enquired about quite late. This can lead to magnificent economic failures.
In reality, the two approaches, technical and marketing, do not oppose each other but complement each other, as innovation arises more from collective rather than solitary work.
Venture capital professionals thus emphasize that the team constitutes, even before the technology and the targeted market, nearly 75% of their selection criteria. A dream team combines a visionary, a marketer, an engineer, and a financier, these key components that can rarely be embodied by a single person.
Ultimately, being innovative derives as much from a mindset as from a method… and a good dose of implementation, going as far as enabling serendipity to be industrialized.
The best teams are those that adopt ways of thinking and acting that enable them to implement innovations that will have, even in appearance, the elegance of simplicity.
