Top 5 Innovation Killers - #2

#2 - An excessive customer focus. Professional managers are great at using customer research to improve existing products and services. But, faced with a radically new proposition people are poor predictors of their own future behaviour. In a recent posting on this blog, Italian designer, Alberto Alessi described how he eschews market research and evaluates new ideas in order to help take informed risks and not as a simple yes/no exercise.

General Mills Analysis -- in terms of getting 'close to the consumer' and understanding their needs, General Mills has improved dramatically over the past few years......BUT these efforts are primarily focused on sustaining innovation, not disruptive innovation. We have a strong suite of Consumer Insights tools at our disposal to better understand how consumer view existing products and categories. This allows us to develop and launch successful close-in new products. When it comes to disruptive innovation, however, we have yet to crack the code on fully understanding consumers' latent needs and future behavior. The one potential downfall of our strong Consumer Insights tools is that we tend to rely too heavily on them to answer ALL new products/innovation questions, when in reality we need to introduce an element of intuition and judgment when evaluating transformational/disruptive ideas. The use of these tools to answer all questions is a way to make decisions more objective, which is symptomatic of a risk-averse culture. Can we begin using judgment more often to make key innovation decisions, or does our culture need to first be more open to risk-taking and experimentation before the decision-making changes? Chicken or the egg??