One reason people mistakenly think that innovation is inherently risky is because they confuse it with creativity. Innovation and creativity are different. Creativity is just one part of a corporate innovation process. Your innovation process should do all the preparatory work required to enable your creative team to focus on the right things and consistently deliver results.

For an innovation process to consistently deliver results, it must start with discovering the target customers’ unmet needs. Most companies don’t know how to do this because they don’t have agreement about what a customer “need” really is. We have found that, for the purpose of innovation, a customer need is best defined as the functional, emotional and social jobs customers are trying to get done, and the criteria they use to measure success.

But it’s not enough to only discover the customers’ needs. We must also determine which needs are unmet, i.e., important and unsatisfied. The more important and less satisfied a need is, the greater the opportunity for innovation and growth it presents. Trying to add value to an unimportant need or to an already well-satisfied need is to misallocate resources. Only important unsatisfied needs are worthy of pursuit. And only after you have identified and ranked the customers’ unmet needs are you ready to generate solution ideas that will reliably address your customers’ unmet needs.

Your innovation process should set the stage for creativity by identifying and ranking the customers’ unmet needs and then bringing them into the room with your solution experts. Then creativity will inevitably happen. Connections will be made between the customers’ unmet needs and your solution capabilities. And regardless of how you address the customers’ unmet needs, the customers’ unmet needs will be addressed. So, where’s the risk? It’s been removed by identifying and ranking the customers’ unmet needs before attempting to generate solution ideas. Knowing where to focus makes all the difference in the world.

Admittedly, there is always some risk that your solution idea won’t effectively address the customers’ unmet needs any better than current solutions. Yet, we know from numerous studies that the vast majority of new business and product failures occur because they fail to address an important unsatisfied customer need, not because the company couldn’t build a better solution (see Nail It Then Scale It, by Furr and Ahlstrom, p. 26).

To create a compelling new offering, find a compelling unmet need.

Reveal growth. Create needs. Drive growth. We can show you how.

(A version of this article appeared in The Business Journal, November 23, 2020).