What Customers Want

Anthony W. Ulwick contends that the usual ways companies listen to customers are the main source of wasted effort and missed opportunities in innovation. Citing estimates that 50 to 90 percent of innovation initiatives flop, he argues that qualitative research gathers well-meant but misleading inputs such as solutions, specifications, needs and benefits. His alternative, outcome-driven innovation, looks instead at the metrics customers use to judge success when getting a job, task or activity done, and treats those desired outcomes as the inputs for developing products and services. The goal is to turn innovation into a rigorous discipline rather than a matter of chance. His critique rests on more than 200 studies across over seventy companies in twenty-five industries.

Rick Faleschini, a marketing vice president at Johnson & Johnson, endorsed it, crediting outcome-driven thinking with helping grow share in the angioplasty balloon market from under 1 percent to more than 20 percent.