Exceptions to listening to customers?

Your last paragraph is the key one here. Any good product or service is the result of deeply understanding the problems customers have. The key is then to use your knowledge of the market, the competition, the technology and your own in-house skills to build a compelling solution to that problem. Only rarely will a customer be able to tell you what they want; it is researchs' job to figure out what their pain is.

From that standpoint, the Steve Jobs and Henry Ford positions are much more understandable. No one asked Apple for an iPod, but the desire to have your music with you at all times was well established (from Walkmans to portable record players of yore). What Jobs and his team did was understand that need thoroughly, then use their assets in technology to devise a new -- and ultimately, game-changing -- solution to an "old" problem.

While I agree that innovation is "incremental" in the sense that it is based on successively richer understanding of the problem, solutions to those problems can often represent a much more significant leap when a player like Apple or Henry Ford sees new ways to combine ingredients and make a superior solution.

The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christenson talks about this very subject. I've had a chance to try Outcome-Driven Innovation, which centers around focusing on the jobs people try to accomplish. No one wants a drill bit, they want a hole. People didn't want an iPod, they wanted to manage their music. People didn't want a car, they wanted to minimize the time it takes to get from point A to point B.

That's why two dissimilar products can be in competition in someone's head. Instead of grabbing a handsaw, I might grab a sledge hammer, if I'm simply trying to break a long piece of wood into pieces that fit in a trash can.

It is my experience that customers will tell you about an ipod kind of idea though not using that term.
It takes time and genuine interest in our customers to lead a customer to a new product or idea. There are no short cuts. We must engage our customers in conversation and discover what they like and dislike about their current horse. We should be talking to them about what a better horse would be like, what could it do, etc.
Having these kinds of conversations, over an extended period of time, will describe, in function, a car-- known by any other name as a better horse.

"Customers, important as they are, are not designers."

Very true, though in the case of Apple, *the designers are customers*. As Jonathan Ive said in a recent interview[1], "We don't have to take this great intuitive leap to understand the mythical concerns of our users, because we are the users." (This is not just "eating your own dog food", but actually *being a dog*, as it were.)

When you're desigining consumer products for whom you're also the target market, you can do great design for the whole market simply by designing for yourself. Poor designers can't get away with this: their designs won't appeal broadly; they won't properly intuit how other people will interact with their designs. But Apple's check against those problems is having excellent designers (like Ive) with incredible intuition and empathy for the broader market, and, of course Steve Jobs -- arguably the world's greatest arbiter of product appealing.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/comment/claire-beale/claire-beale-on-advertising-830554.html

Good point, Mihira... though to be fair I think Apple, because of its unique position in industry, its unique CEO, unique history, etc. can pull off things that other companies simply can't. For most companies it would be a little dangerous to say, "Since Apple does it this way, so will we." What works for Apple, in other words, doesn't always apply to the wider world of design and innovation.

Absolutely, Mark -- I completely agree. Apple's recipe for success works great at altitudes that few can reach, to mix some metaphors. ;)

I totally agree that when you study a group of people, you can’t just take them at their word, but it sure is a great place to start. I think there is an analogy here between using self-report in psychological research and using customer generated ideas in requirements gathering. Its not that it doesn’t produce useful data, its just not always enough. I would be shocked to learn that the iphone designers didn’t conduct focus groups and contextual inquiries, but I bet they also validated their designs with more objective performance metrics.

Like Geoffrey, I think Clayton Christensen's thinking is relevant to this discussion. I first 'met' Clayton Christensen's ideas in an excerpt from a co-authored paper on the HBS website = "What Customers Want from Your Products" [http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5170.html]
It's not ever about asking users WHAT they want. It's about letting them tell 'how they do their business' [or watching them] so that the designer can sense and see the opportunities and constraints that apply to the design. And yes, user input has little to do with designing breakthrough products such as radios small enough to carry everywhere or portable phones.

Mark,

We found exactly the same thing in our research for Tuned In. Even with Apple. Sure, they skip some steps because they're great at design but they also know how to find unresolved problems. The key to the iPod was not only it's design but the problem it solved in the music industry to enable easy and authorized downloads. The iPhone has some of those same characteristics. It takes much more than simple market research to find these things. It's observation and qualitative question of why people do what they do and what would make their life better that create these kinds of breakthroughs. And, unfortunately, it's the part that most businesses skip.

Too many companies interprete "listening to the customers" with "providing the features the customers say they need or want". This seldom leads to any innovation because the customers do not know what's feasible. They only know one thing: what they need to achieve personally and professionally!
So "listening to the customers" need to be reinterpreted to "understanding what the customers need to achieve personally and professionally and why". In other words, eliciting clear customer requirements.
Steve Jobs, Henry Ford have an intutive understanding of the customer and they hit paydirt at their first attempt. But many others had to go through several iterations before getting that iconic product out. History forgot the previous attempts: People tend to have forgotten that the first Walkman was not that successful; that the first personal digital assistants was not successful, that the first CD players were not successful, that the first microwave oven was not successful, and the list goes on and on. What has made these innvations ultimately successful is that once having introduced the first technology-push "failure", these innovators indeed listened to the first users to introduced follow-up versions that became successful.
No company can be sustainably successful without this closed feedback loop between product and customer. It does not matter what comes first. What matters is that the loop be closed as soon as possible.

Hear hear. This is what I tell mu students every time this comes up: the difference between incremental (I use the term evolutionary) and revolutionary product development.

I agree with the observation that most innovation is in fact incremental. However, a lot of innovations fail because the environment in which they should be used is not incorporated in some way in the innovation, be it in marketing, in manuals, functionality etc.

Regards,
Gerard

I agree with Mihira. Apple can literally design products for themselves. Their staff is the customer. It is a unique and powerful position. Many companies don't have this luxury.

Granted this doesn't mean they will build a great product, but I think they can mitigate making any big mistakes.

Couple this with a world class salesman(Jobs) & designer (Ive) and you truly have a one of a kind business.