1. Introduction Truly understanding customer needs in the first stages an innovation project leads to lower product and service failure levels. “Start talking to your customers” is the mantra that many innovation consultants nowadays are using to help their clients come up with better innovations. By applying methods like Lean Startup innovation consultants and their clients are forced to get out of the building to speak to their customers in earlier stages of the innovation process. This development towards more customer interaction is very positive and should be encouraged, but what we often see is that this customer interaction only takes place once an idea about the solution (a new product or service) has already been formed. Many innovators, (innovation managers, business developers, service designers, product designers and innovation consultants) believe they have an idea about the customer’s latent needs, problems or dreams and interpret this easily into a solution. The claim of this article is that by discovering and answering the (latent) need of customers an innovation will truly be successful, since customers know what they want and need and thus guarantee that new products developed accordingly will satisfy the market. This claim has been supported by scholars since early nineties who have also pointed out that “early customer integration minimizes the risk of a later change of construction due to customers’ wishes and so prevents an increase in costs and a reduction of profits caused by a delayed market introduction (Atuahene-Gima, 1995; Bacon & Beckman, 1994; Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Murphy & Kumar, 1996; Murphy & Kumar, 1997). If this has been known for many years and there a lot of customer focused methods out there, why is customer focused innovation methods still not a common approach for discovering unmet needs? This paper will answer this question through the following three research questions:
RQ 1: What are customer focused innovation methods? RQ 2: How can customer focused innovation methods be applied in practical situations? RQ 3: What can we learn from applying customer focused innovation methods in practice?
The objective of this article is to give the reader:
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Insight into the commonly used customer focused innovation methods in Deloitte’s innovation practice Clear examples and practical steps for applying these customer focused innovation methods through case studies Awareness on the challenges when applying these methods and how to overcome certain barriers
