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."

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.

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.