by Michael Schrage | 10:00 AM November 8, 2010
Innovators always want their offspring to be faster, better, and/or cheaper. Successful innovators constantly push novelty to create new value. But the innovators who reap the most rewarding results understand the importance of asking:
What does this innovation want you to become?
Facebook wants you to become someone who attracts, wins, and manages a social network of friends and acquaintances while becoming more sharing and open about your own life. Google wants you to become someone always willing to take a few moments to tap a few keys to explore any question you might have around any topic you might be interested in. The iPad wants you to become someone who’s willing to touch and stroke your way to digital entertainment and information anywhere and anytime. The Kindle wants you to become a bookworm extraordinaire; a textually-tropic annelid who loves to read, annotate and share books and magazines.
All authentic innovations ask you — want you — to become a different dimension of yourself. The best and most enduring innovations make you someone else.
What does Wal-Mart’s innovation ask? The Bentonville behemoth wants you to become someone who gets the brands they desire at the best possible price every day. What’s Target’s innovation ask? The Minneapolis merchant wants you to become someone who appreciates the value and appeal of great design at a great price; you’re as much a connoisseur as a consumer.
The “innovation ask” goes beyond wondering how best to brand the innovation; it explicitly seeks to transform its users. That’s the breakthrough. The innovation doesn’t merely “add value;” it fundamentally alters the perception and behavior. Henry Ford’s mass-production Model-T was a fantastic innovation but his biggest impact was turning ordinary people into drivers. Sloan refined that transformation by better aligning motorists with market segments. Does anyone doubt that Toyota’s Prius and the current explosion of “green” vehicle innovation is less a tale of technological ingenuity than a global initiative that asks drivers to become more environmentally aware and responsible as they hit the road? Toyota’s “innovation ask” is that you become as ecologically sensitive and adaptive as the car you drive.
The inspiration for “innovation asks” came from work by Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis and Neil Postman — media theorists and critics who constantly explored how changes in media influenced patterns of thought. What did the medium ask you to do? Reading demanded that you sit down and literally follow a line — and then pages — of argument in a linear fashion until its conclusion. Radio asked that you listen carefully and let your mind’s eye conjure up imagery to complement the words and music. Television….well, television just asks you to lean back and watch….
Focusing on features and functionality as springboards for innovation misses the point. Analyzing whether people like or dislike an innovation — or how innovations are used and abused — misunderstands the real power and influence an innovation may have.
Emphasizing the benefits and value propositions of innovations falls squarely into exhausted marketing paradigms around brands and customer segmentation. The better, and more useful, way for innovators to design and frame their innovation efforts is to openly challenge themselves to debate what, exactly, their creations are asking their users to become. What are the “attributes” of the ask? Are innovators asking their prospective users to spend more time or less time with their friends and families? Are they asking users to relax or become more intense? Are they asking people to learn something new or rely upon intuitive familiarities?
Don’t minimize or ignore even seemingly quirky innovation asks: What does ‘wine in a carton’ ask its customers to become? What does a McDonald’s Happy Meal (now banned in San Francisco) ask parents, children and families to become? The “innovation ask” is about a different innovation essence: the challenge is not defining and designing the best possible innovative offering but determining what those definitions and designs want the user to become once the innovation is fully integrated into their lives. When Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos present their innovation offering to the world, you know that they are not simply asking billions of people to buy, and use, their products and services. They are asking people to become someone else, someone new, someone with a different sense and sensibility about using technology as a medium to interact with the world.
I think that’s why they do so well.
Here’s my innovation ask: What kind of innovator do you think this post is asking you to become?
MICHAEL SCHRAGE
Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?, and The Innovator's Hypothesis (forthcoming).
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