• They don’t have the right culture
• They aren’t “creative”
• They don’t have the courage
• They don’t understand sustainability
• They don’t understand meaning
• They don’t have the right process
None of these is a complex problem to solve, but without the will, attention, tools, and commitment, it simply can’t be changed. In addition, some of these issues are difficult to shift (particularly those dealing with culture, management, and leadership—which is to say, all of them).
One of the most fundamental handicaps that organizations of all sorts don’t realize they have is that they don’t understanding marketing. At its most basic definition, and this could be a book itself, marketing is not messaging to customers. Most companies position marketing within their organizations as the mechanism they use to tell their customers, partners, competitors, markets, and the world what they want them to know about their products, services, mission, vision, and organization. They often lump in marketing with sales, advertising, PR, and other departments, further erasing the distinctions. But these functions already have their own disciplines, namely: sales, advertising, PR, promotion, etc.
A better way to think about marketing is to think of it as breathing. Marketing is the inhale. It’s what you learn from your customers, competitors,
industry, market, etc., and PR, sales, advertising, etc., are the exhale. It’s what and how you communicate to the rest of the world. Many marketers will tell you that they already inhale, through “market research.”
But most traditional market research is worthless for innovation because it emphasizes the quantitative over the qualitative, and the techniques often employed are laughably inaccurate and misleading. To distinguish traditional tools from new tools, some use the term “ market insight,” which refers to ethnographic and other techniques to uncover qualitative attributes that are otherwise invisible or unmeasurable (such as customer needs that operate at the level of emotions, values, and meaning). These are techniques that many designers understand better than their peers and, as such, are often the best people in an organization to connect these learnings with corporate strategy.
To be sure, the best marketers use both qualitative and quantitative techniques, but they do so with only the best tools. To date, most marketing departments inhale only competitor and industry data effectively and find many reasons to discount the need for qualitative customer understanding—especially technology-focused organizations. Yet this is where everything needed to truly innovate effectively lies.
It’s also important to look not only at customers but also at all of the stakeholders who have influence over your business. That’s stakeholder, not shareholder, and there are, potentially, a lot of them: customers,
“Tomorrow’s B-School?
It Might Be a D-School”
—Special Report, 2005,
BusinessWeek
“CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them”
—Bruce Nussbaum, 2007,
BusinessWeek
clients, employees, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, suppliers, partners, creditors, stockholders (shareholders), communities, government courts and departments (city, state, federal, and international), banks, media, institutional investors and fund managers, labor unions, insurers and reinsurers, NGOs, media, business groups, trade associations, competitors, the general public, and the environment (local, regional, and global).
Different stakeholders can exercise different types of power and be impediments or partners to innovation. Engaging them helps organizations operate effectively and make better decisions (both strategic and tactical).
What’s the Right Culture for Innovation? Most organizations don’t understand that their culture makes it easier or more difficult to innovate effectively and requires a different approach for success than what might work at their competitors. Consultants, too, often fail to understand their clients’ culture, which drastically affects their ability to develop
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