The Hard Truth I Learned About Innovation—And How You Can Avoid It

I first got involved with innovation professionally back in the early 2000s when I was working with a strategy consulting firm, helping large B2B clients drive revenue growth in their key accounts.

Part of my job was to conduct interviews with key account stakeholders to get feedback about our client’s services and uncover opportunities for improvement. And we did a good job helping clients make incremental improvements, tweaking existing products, and refining service delivery.

Then I left that firm to work with a new client full-time on what I thought was a similar problem: they wanted help creating new offerings in new markets. Simple enough, I thought – we’ll I’ll figure out what questions to ask the target customers when we get there.

But then I hit a roadblock.

When I sat down to create my interview guide, I realized I had a big problem: my client didn’t have a product in the market yet for me to get feedback on. They didn’t need insights on what to tweak; they needed guidance on what to create.

And that’s when I discovered something that changed the way I think about customer needs forever.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in figuring out what customers really want? Reply and let me know – I’d love to hear.