The final error is to ask their customers for their opinion. Pretty much any company I know has a yearly customer survey. However, there are two things wrong with this. Firstly, these people are already your customer; sure they are going to be satisfied with you; the others have already long voted with their feet. We call it selection bias. You are selecting to ask the ones who already like you, but what about the ones who don’t?
Secondly, even when a company is asking potential customers about their ideas for innovation, in the form of market research, it is tricky. It is usually takes the shape of asking respondents whether they would like (and buy) the new idea. Consumer research often is useful but not for truly innovative ideas and markets that do not exist yet. Research on the fax machine came back unambiguous: every respondent answered that they would never buy a machine like that; likewise for the mobile phone. As Farooq Chaudhry, producer at the highly innovative Akram Khan Dance Company, once put it to me: “Customers? Forget about them.”
In conclusionb, if you want to be really innovative, you have to be leading the customers; not be led by them.
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