the new hr

Innovation
Dilemmas
© Buschmen | Dreamstime.com - Miele Gallery On Unter Den Linden Photo
The challenge of using
as a tool for innovation in their
canned questionnaires
marketing efforts.
Despite the advances
is that customers
in technology that enable
struggle to articulate
companies to co-create
their needs.
personalised experiences
with customers, the nontechnology
sectors still face
some challenges. For example, how does Tata
Motors or Maruti Suzuki co-create an automobile
with customers? A key article by Goffin, Varnes,
van der Hoven, and Koners (2012) highlights these
challenges. One of the main methods organisations
employ to understand customer needs are survey
questions and focus groups. The challenge of using
canned questionnaires is that customers struggle
to articulate their needs 2 . They are not aware of
the limitations of the current products, and cannot
imagine what future possibilities are. Furthermore,
they are prompted to think about existing products
rather than probing for unresolved issues and
unmet needs. Although using focus groups alleviates
some of these challenges, two still remain. Firstly,
customers behave differently when in their own
environments. Secondly, when they are outside
their own environments, market researchers miss
out on seeing valuable contextual clues that give
designers potential ideas. These authors suggest that
using ethnography to understand customer needs
enables organisations to tap into unrecognised as
well as unarticulated customer needs. For example,
they refer to Miele, a German manufacturer of
high-end domestic appliances, who used ‘listen and
watch’ teams to observe the cleaning practices of
parents who have children suffering from allergies.
Home visits suggested that parents of children with
allergies vacuumed a mattress several times a day
to know that it is clean. However, these parents
did not complain about the extra time or amount
of intense cleaning because they were used to
regular intensive cleaning. The ‘listen and watch’
teams recognised this hidden need and developed
a vacuum cleaner that indicated if an item being
cleaned is dust-free. They included a hygiene
sensor that turned from red to amber to green
as the cleaning progressed. This sensor became a
breakthrough feature for people who have allergies
to know when a room is free of dust.
Thus, there are several ways through which
organisations assess customer needs and
incorporate the voice of the customer when
developing innovations. These include several
quantitative and qualitative approaches such as
field surveys, qualitative interviews, key informant
approach, and frameworks that result from them,
including ‘the customer-centered innovation map’, 3
‘customer journey mapping’, 4 and ‘jobs-to-bedone’.
5 To understand whether you are simply
‘hearing the voice’ of the customer or ‘co-creating’
with them, here are some questions to consider 6 .
1. Is the conversation end point clear? The end
point emerges as a result of a dialogue between
the firm and the customer in a co-creation
framework, whereas in traditional market
research the end point is clearly defined.
2. Do the firm and the customer build off of each
other’s comments? One idea from a customer
triggers ideas that the firm could build upon and
vice-versa, where both the firm and customer
explore and jointly create new ideas.
3. Is there a willingness to explore the assumptions
that underlie the dialogue? Both the firm
and customer must identify and explore the
assumptions such that they understand their
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