As per Wikipedia, the term innovation means a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully.

A source of innovation becoming widely recognized, is end-user innovation. This is where an agent (person or company) develops an innovation for their own (personal or in-house) use because existing products do not meet their needs. This is very interesting, normal users unimpressed with off the shelf solutions create new products. An easy example that comes to mind – the Dyson vaccum cleaner. How many times have we all used some daily life product and thought “I could have designed this better myself”, but how many of us have turned our thoughts into actions?

At Stanford Professor Tse says “Users make a product innovative. If users cannot take an idea beyond what you originally thought they could use, then you probably do not have an innovation”. This means giving customers (and even your competitors) access to tools to create their own experiences and in the process creating a whole new ecosystem of value creators and value users. The Internet world is littered with examples of companies who have made millions by giving away their product [Google, Linux, Mozilla, Appstore]. Digital commerce works in counter-intuitive ways.

Over the last few decades innovation centers have risen and fallen – Apple went from an innovation hotbed to nothing and then came back as the poster child of innovation with its ipod, appstore and iphone. Downturns like the one in 2001 and 2008 have taught us that ultimately it is survival of the fittest – the companies to survive are those that delivered real products to market, resulting in tangible revenues.

We at Zaak are 100% focused on customer oriented product innovation. Our thinking is that those who design products must first learn to respect those who are going to use the products. If we can think with our user caps on and develop products that best serve user needs we will end up building products that deliver value and thereby generate revenue.

The key takeaways here are:

  • Forget about consumers (those who consume what you provide) and embrace the fact that the Customer is King (you provide what customers want).
  • Indulge your ideas, explore market opportunities and involve real users early on to see their reactions and improvize accordingly.

There you go – a simple recipe for some home (or shall we say garage) brewed new products!

Want to add or subtract to our thoughts just leave a comment.