‘Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your little egocentric heart.’ Steven King
Innovation can be a painful process. Good writing, for example, involves substantial rewriting, and often this means cutting the things we’re most attached to. ‘Look how clever I am!’ Like Narcissus, we fall in love with our reflection. The thing is, your ‘darlings’ are usually lousy. (I speak from experience.)
The Better Mousetrap Fallacy
This is doubly true
when you’re trying to develop a new product or service. The harsh truth is,
people don’t care about your ‘darling’, they just want to solve their problem.
The popular 19th Century proverb: "Build a better mousetrap,
and the world will beat a path to your door." – is mostly wrong.
Creating a
technically superior product does not automatically lead to commercial
success. For example, over 4,400 U.S. patents have been issued for new
mousetrap designs – and almost all of them failed. The simple, cheap snap-trap
designed in 1894 remains the dominant commercial standard.
(As always, good
judgement & finesse are required. On occasion, a brilliant technical
innovation, say a much faster computer chip or a drive that holds way more
memory will indeed dominate the market.)
As a rule, technical
superiority does not equal customer demand. Consumers buy outcomes (getting rid
of mice easily and cheaply), not intricate engineering. Innovations succeed
only when they solve an acute, recognized use pain point, and not what the
creator assumes the user needs.
Love the Problem – Not Your Great Idea
Most people find this one hard to absorb & I’m no exception. The fact is nobody cares about your great idea. They just want to solve their problem.
And so, we need to
love the problem & accept the unpredictable direction our experiments take
us. Such pivots are normal. It’s common
to end up in an entirely different market segment and a radically different
offering. One FMCG Innovation team we mentored in East Asia starting out
focused on delivering a premium soft drink aimed at affluent Gen Z customers. They ended up delivering a premium
plant-based drink for upwardly mobile Gen Y & Gen X customers worried about
whether they’d be around to support their elderly parents.
Another B2B
innovation team started out focused on delivering premium car care products
aimed at high-end auto body shops. They
ended up providing modular kits aimed at newly-arrived professionals &
entrepreneurs keen on showing the world & their families that they had made
it. Yet another Innovation team in the Financial Services industry started out
focused on levelling up a wealth management app, and ended up creating a user-friendly
small business loan application app that provided loans to qualified applicants
within 48 hours.
Pivoting is like riffing
in a jazz piece or like modulating to a new key in jazz composition. You hear
the same themes, voicings and chord structures, but somewhat different, and in
a different context. A great Innovation team is like a great band. Love the
problem, love the process.
Stay tuned.
Best wishes,
Pascal Dennis E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org
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