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.
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.
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