Lance A. Bettencourt, PhD, has led job-centric innovation projects with many of the world’s leading companies and his thought-leadership is evident his publications on job-centric innovation.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Rethinking Service Innovation
His book Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services was my introduction to Service Design. In a past podcast, I asked Lance;
Your book spends a lot of time uncovering these customer needs versus what I would say is how to create innovation. Why so much emphasis on that topic?
Lance: Obviously, there are a couple reasons. One just comes from my background and my expertise. My work in applying these concepts certainly has gone forward to the conceiving stage, working with clients on strategy, conceiving ideas, as well. But a lot of my work with clients, both in terms of the executive education work but as well as in terms of the project work that I’ve done, has been, really, to help them to navigate that fuzzy front end of innovation in terms of understanding customer needs.
Certainly, from a capabilities standpoint, for me and my expertise, it made sense. However, why that area in particular? Why is that even the area where I was doing all this work and why I continue to do this work? It is because I think that that is an area of the innovation process where companies tend to struggle more.
There are actually a lot of authors who have said most companies don’t struggle with having enough ideas, even enough good ideas. Where they struggle is knowing which of these ideas are truly going to be valuable from a customer perspective.
That comes back to, well, do they understand customer needs? Do they understand how to understand customer needs that can, again, work at driving and guiding both short-term innovations and also longer-term innovations, whether it is the business model, services, disruption, et cetera?
So much of it comes back to a good understanding of customer needs, and I felt, really, that’s where there’s a lot of misunderstandings, both in the services realm but also in the product realm.
For those two reasons combined is why I spend so much in the book to make sure that is really well-understood, because once you have a good understanding of that, that can really guide the remainder of the process in a very efficient and effective manner. And in contrast, if you don’t understand your customer needs well, it can undermine everything else that comes after it.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Rethinking Service Innovation
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