Creating "Aha" products

 

Suppose you have been entrusted with the responsibility of seeking Innovation in your team/company to find the next big growth opportunity. Or you yourself have decided to take the plunge as an entrepreneur and be a disruptive innovator. 

Where do you start? The theory of disruptive innovation itself does not tell you where to look for new opportunities. It doesn't predict or explain specifically how a new company should innovate to undermine an established incumbent or where to create new markets. 

Last thing anybody wants is going into the frustration loop of hit and miss innovation (i.e. trial and error). Nobody likes to leave their fate to luck. But then how do you create products and services that customers will want to buy - and have a deterministic prediction which new products will succeed.

Let's take an example of running a restaurant and you have been seeking ways to improve either your existing product or create a new product. A regular way of understanding this would be to seek data (i.e. direct feedback from customers) - as to how they could improve their existing product offerings or what new products one would like to see.

But that's a one size fit all solution. Nothing wrong with this approach, but the degree to which this feedback could really translate into new sales/growth is questionable. Rather, how about approaching the same question in a bit different way - what is the underlying reason (think of this as a "job") that causes people to come to our restaurant and buy (think of this as "hire") what they are buying?

Basically customers are hiring a product to perform/satisfy a specific job in their lives. If we try to understand that underlying reasoning towards any customer spending - then we could derive insights which could create amazing guidelines for creating sought after products. 

A clear cut example of this would be a customer hiring (buying) a product in a restaurant early in the morning could have a very different job (reasoning) than hiring the same product in a weekend afternoon. 

Creating an "Aha" moment for customers starts here.