Short course in innovation from a venture capitalist

Charlie O'Donnell, a venture capitalist in New York, just wrote a great short course in innovation. If every budding (or veteran!) entrepreneur in the world would just read these two paragraphs, we'd all be enjoying more useful, enjoyable, and meaningful products and services in very short order.

Quoting, emphasis mine:

What I find most disappointing about many of the ideas I see [is that] they appear to be more about solving for what will get funded or what's a derivative of a product they saw on Techcrunch that they don't even use themselves versus understanding and improving the lives of the population at large. Entrepreneurs ...too often extrapolate non-existent trends or false perceived needs from their very homogeneous social circles.

If you're going to design a product, it's so incredibly important to not only diversify the kinds of people you interact with socially, but spend a fair bit of analysis and contemplation to really understand trends in their behavior. Why does someone use or not use Service A? Entrepreneurs are, to their own disadvantage, punting on the understanding of human behavior they need to design products for the masses. Perhaps if you spend a little less time pitching and more time listening--figuring out why people use the products they do and observing how they interact with others, you'd have more users. Before you get confident that you've got something, get curious about why people are doing what they're doing.

Charlie makes a great point. Listen to your users BEFORE you make all your strategic decisions. Yes, even users might actually tell you something you wouldn't have thought of. Don't wait until the last minute to bring users in. (If you could use help, contact us at Creative Good. This is what we do.)

Subscribe here for Charlie's newsletter (where the text above appeared) - weekly, focused on digital innovation in NYC. On Twitter he's @ceonyc.

• Jul 5, 2011
• IN: Customer Experience
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