In my effort to ripoff myself, I thought I’d start by outlining what i mean by innovation and other related terms.
My working definition of innovation refers to a capitalization on new business opportunities through new products, services, processes or experiences (collectively referred to simply as product hereafter). New ideas that cannot be tied to business opportunities may be wonderfully creative, but ultimately inert in terms of capitalization, and so fail my working definition.
Opportunities are situations that afford both a chance to create value for someone or something at a profit in some new or unique way, and a chance to achieve and maintain a position of competitive advantage.
Now here is where things get a little controversial. I believe that people and organizations are more strongly averse to pain than they are attracted to pleasure. This negative motivation means that one will most consistently provide higher value by helping to alleviate pain. This is of course a philosophical position I cannot (yet) prove with empirical evidence.
I’m defining pain to refer to a problem that 1) costs a subject time, money and/or attention, 2) the subject experiencing the problem accurately recognizes it, and 3) the problem is sufficiently acute to warrant spending time, money, and/or attention to alleviate it.
Pain then boils down to cost, in terms of time, money and attention (and in the case of consumers, perhaps personal ego as well). If the cost to alleviate the pain is less than the cost of living with it, we have ourselves a business opportunity ripe for a great new innovation to capitalize on. Please forgive the Fischer-Price economics—I’m just trying to lay some very basic definitions.
Under this interpretation, necessity really is the mother of invention.
With consumers it appears most (if not all) pains are costs related to at least one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (or another needs hierarchy like Clayton Alderfer’s ERG). Henry spends a lot of money on diet books because he feels that his weight is costing him more in terms of belongingness than the books cost financially. Buying these books is his way to solve the pain of not belonging to his perception of a certain group.
These definitions raise further questions, such as:
- Other than pain what else can give rise to business opportunities?
- Should focusing on pain differ between consumers and businesses (what pain does the iPod solve? and is that why people are snapping them up?)
- Are there pains other than time/money/attention/ego costs that give rise to business opportunities?
- Does something like Maslow seem appropriate for classifying pains?
- Could it provide some insight into pains in order to drive innovative solutions, or is it just too academic?
- Is there a similar needs hierarchy for business customers, or does Maslow apply to businesses too?
Yer Maslow link is borked!
No longer borked!
Priceless. I think I will put this on a post-it and keep it by my monitor…
“Other than pain what else can give rise to business opportunities?”
Lee,
That’s a good question. I’m sure there are sources of opportunity other than pain. However I’ve found that expploring customer pains most consistently (though now always) reveals wothy opportunities.
So any thoughts on other sources of opportunity that deliver success more than mere chance or dumb luck?
Agreed that identifying customer pain points is a good starting point for opportunities. But I think we need to be careful about taking to reductive and rationalistic approach to pain. Many, if not most, products on the market today address issues or pains that the person who ended up buying them was not aware of or would not have been able to articulate. The iPod “eases the pian” of a problem that 99% (approx) of people who own it did not even have, as they did not have any mp3’s to begin with. There is a big difference in *discovering* pain and then *validating* it after that fact by showing people a product and having them react positiviely to it (because they recognize that it does something for them).
In Western developed nations we have very little pain any more, compared to people at the bottom of the pyramid (the economic one, not the Maslow one). Our pains are either very small things like the paper coffee filters are hard to separate, or very big things like life pressures of time, money, family, etc. The first one products and designers can deal with very well, the second is much harder for a product to solve (and arguably many of those pressures are created by the products themselves).
If you haven’t seen it, check out Todd Wilken’s post on the Adaptive Path blog about “A New Framework”. don’t know if html’s going to work here so I’ll just type it: http://www.adaptivepath.com/2006/07/13/a-new-framework/
Adam,
In baseball Sammy Sosa wins you a lot of press. However he doesn’t win you penants. The guys who do that are the ones who consistently hit singles and doubles. Not sexy, but when they go to bat your team will take another base.
Its similar in business. Consistent delivery of value is better than dramatic black swans. And I’ve found that starting with pain delivers the more consistent, marketable value than starting with what I think is a good idea for a product.
So while focusing on pain may be a bit reductionist, it is only meant to be, as you said, a good starting point. For what? For discovering high-potential value business opportunities. And conceptualizing around a known business opportunity is a far more bankable business success strategy than starting with an idea and hope to stumble across the opportunity.
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You mustn’t confuse awareness or articulation of pain with existence of pain. Just because people aren’t consciously aware of pain, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. For example nurses face new workflow obstacles all the time. And they just deal. Soon they loose awareness of the new problem and it just fades into the background with the countless other problems they have. Yet the problem remains, draining their productivity and happiness. Ask them, and they won’t articulate the problem. Observe them and you quickly see the problem and its interconnection with many others.
As a designer I see understanding and articulating the problems others cannot as the first half of my job.
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I try to never talk about the iPod here–but it seems you’ve cornered me 🙂 the iPod is perhaps the least innovative product that comes to mind. It is merely a new plastic case on a product Sony proved over 25 years ago, and Diamond Rio took digital about a 10 years ago. Apple neither discovered, nor validated anything–all that work had long been done. They merely recognized a problem that was preventing players from crossing the chasm: they were ugly, geeky and hard to use. Apple addressed these problems and busted its ass to get the word out.
Furthermore the iPod was not so much about what the market wanted–it was about moving Apple away from computer business where it had been taking a beating and could not get ahead, toward consumer electronics, a much much larger market that places more value on what Apple does best than computer markets had. The iPod solved Apple’s pain.
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What evidence do you have that the West feels very little pain anymore. Global measures of happiness do not show western countries at the top.
It strikes me more that we simply have different pains from people elsewhere in the economic pyramid. Our pains are psychic and social, rather than about survival. So while our pains may be more trivial, they are more complex, varied and numerous than those felt be people striving for survival.
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Anyway, something tells me that we aren’t really disagreeing, and thanks for commenting with something that made me think.