What Matters Now

The goal with innovation is to amaze customers with something they never could have imagined, but having once experienced it, can't imagine living without. What falls into that category for you? My list would include digital video recorders (thanks, TiVo), online restaurant reservations (way to go, OpenTable), free international video conferencing (gracias, Skype), and customized Internet radio (bravo, Pandora).

To amaze customers with the unexpected, you must first uncover their unspoken needs. Customers have their own orthodoxies; like the rest of us, they are prisoners of the familiar. So asking them what they want seldom yields fundamentally new insights. Instead, you have to observe them, up close and over time, and then reflect on what you've learned: Where are we wasting our customers' time? Where are we making things overly complex? Where are we treating customers like numbers instead of people? Where are we forcing them to solve problems we should solve for them?