Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.
Design empowered innovation combines the best of right and left brain thinking. It has the capacity to deliver better ideas, with more relevance, realized earlier. By focusing on individuals, moments and journeys in ethnography, insights become deeper. By embracing chaos and play in brainstorms, creative teams can explore further. By iterating and early prototyping, ideas become real and develop more rapidly.
Participatory innovation is still a new experience to many practitioners. How do you make sure you are actually listening to users? And how do you organize your company internally to properly involve external stakeholders. Participatory innovation is the new discipline of involving users of products and services, and understanding what they are really saying, even if some of those signals are not what you want to hear or see.
Just because a company is spending money on research (such as markets, customers, or new technologies) and development doesn't mean they will get innovation. Innovation, as with advertising, training, or many other organization investments, depends on the quality of the investment as much as the quantity of resources put in it. A high proportion of innovative new products, services, and companies flop. That's often because managers build better mousetraps without first making sure there are any mice out there. Or that people still want to catch them.
