Have you ever found yourself wondering how to size a market for something that doesn't exist? The conventional – and usually unhelpful – approach is to determine the historical revenue generated from the sale of pre-existing similar offerings.

Even the so-called experts and thought-leaders in innovation frequently talk about the importance of discovering customer's "latent unarticulated needs, needs that customers cannot tell us." This is a very common myth! It is false. The problem is not that customers cannot articulate their needs – they can.

People use metaphors to understand complex phenomena. Metaphors help us to quickly grasp the nature of something elusive. Sports provide us with many excellent metaphors for business and life such as, when we're trying to anticipate market trends, we might tell a colleague "Skate to where the puck will be." Or to encourage a salesperson to make more calls, we say "You can't score if you don't shoot."

Eric Reis has created a movement with the publication of his book The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Based on his experience with consumer software, he encourages entrepreneurs to launch "minimally viable products," run as many "experiments" with these minimally viable products as is possible to accelerate learning about what customers want, and thereby "pivot" to a value proposition that customers want. It sounds quite compelling until you realize that this entire approach is based on one of the great myths about innovation: that customers have latent unarticulated needs, needs that they cannot tell us.

Urko’s Forbes Interview #1: How to Validate a Market (First published in Forbes, Jan 8, 2013, by Gregg Fairbrothers and Catalina Gorla, Contributing Writers) We’ve been talking about market validation. So far we’ve argued why it’s really important and the value it can bring. But how do you do it? This week we spoke with ...

Many entrepreneurs and large companies have mistakenly assumed that Thomas Edison believed in failing faster to learn what customers want. Not true! He learned the folly of this approach early in his career. His thousands of experiments were done only after he validated the customers' needs. In the 2nd half of an interview with Forbes, Urko addresses this misunderstanding

"Just do it." I love this Nike slogan. It conveys a can-do attitude that encourages me to stop procrastinating, get off the couch, and take action! But, just do what, exactly? Take what action? If you want to drive growth through innovation, how do you know where to focus and what to do? There a lot of companies "just doing it" and most of them are just failing! In many cases, entrepreneurs are wasting time and money pursuing the flawed approach of launching a minimally viable product and "failing faster" before they have clarified the market need. This is a huge waste of time if you don't know what the customer is trying to get done first. Let's take a look at how Nike is winning and what we can learn from them.

The Customer Information That is Essential Marketers talk a lot about buyer and user “personas.” A persona is an example or archetype of a real person who buys or might buy specific offerings. Personas can significantly improve focus and decision-making because they provide marketing and new product development teams with a concrete focus. However, not ...

It’s Not a Creativity Problem Innovation enables companies to differentiate, establish competitive advantage, and drive revenue growth. So it isn’t surprising that nearly every executive wants their company to be innovative. When I ask executives how they are driving innovation, I usually hear how they are enhancing their employees’ creativity, such as:

There Really is Such a Thing as a “Bad Idea” How many times have you heard someone say “There’s no such thing as a bad idea?” This is a regularly stated before brainstorming sessions. Its intent is noble: to create a safe place for people to verbalize their ideas and to express their creativity. While ...