Revealing Emerging Expectations, the most important step of innovation.
Emerging expectations are the things customers will start to demand next. These are features, benefits, and values current products are missing but customers haven’t started demanding yet. When customers realize these desires can be met they will demand it from all future products. It’s essential to have something ready when that happens or you will lose customers.
Working on things customers are already asking for puts you in a race with others. If you try to meet existing desires you are in a race against time. Even if you make it to market first, your advantage will quickly disappear. Others will develop competing products, if they haven’t already been working on them. If you don’t have the next product ready your innovation will be overwhelmed with copycats that make improvements on your design.
Revealing emerging expectations allows you to work two steps ahead so you always have the next great thing perfected and ready to release when the demand is strongest and profits are greatest. Plus if you can accurately predict the future innovations you will be able to overwhelm competitors with improvements faster and with less expense than they can copy you. You get ahead, stay ahead, and increase your lead.
Just because you can make it doesn’t mean customers will want it. To get the best return on investment you need to choose the innovations customers will do anything to get. And even if it’s something customers want it doesn’t mean its right for you to sell. So the innovation system you use must reveal a large selection emerging expectations, preferably all, and provide a way for you to compare and rank them in order of value to you.
Many people can think of pie in the sky “futuristic” products. Science fiction is full of those types of ideas. Some of those sci-fi products actually do become real products and are successful. The question is, when? Absolutely predicting the future is impossible but understanding the land marks to watch for gives you the information to plan your actions. If a new product depends on other developments then you should wait for those to be released before releasing yours. You can have everything ready to go and jump into the market at the exact right time. You maximize profits and minimize risk. A complete innovation system shows you those land marks with enough lead time to act.
Revealing the emerging expectations is what makes the OutCompete Predictive Innovation Method predictive and not just another feel good innovation system. The way it does this is by using certain laws of systems that apply to every system. Understanding that every system must follow certain laws allows you to see which things will become “must have innovations” and the order it will occur.
What Makes an Innovation System Complete?
Innovation is more than creativity, it requires 7 steps and each step must satisfy 7 criteria. This video introduces the steps and criteria. In future posts I’ll explore some of the steps and criteria.
For a free 19 page report detailing the criteria contact me and ask for, “What Makes an Innovation System Complete”.
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Apple iPhone Marketing Mistake
Apple is great at marketing. The PC vs. Mac commercials are viral video favorites. Those videos have launched a new micro genre of fan made PC vs. Mac commercials. Now that is some amazing marketing, which I don’t think they quite planned. But they could have predicted. That is why I feel they are making a huge mistake in threatening legal action against people making and sharing skins that make other phones and PDAs look like the iPhone.
Not only do I think it’s a mistake to try to force people to not share these skins I think Apple should make the skins and give them away.
Here is my thinking on this. The graphics on the screen aren’t what makes the iPhone cool, its what the iPhone does, its the functionality that makes an iPhone worth buying. So Apple could have a great viral marketing campaign by saying, “For all you people with other devices you can imagine what its like to have the real thing.” And Apple could poke fun at copy cats saying, “You can look like an iPhone, but to do what an iPhone does, you have to get an iPhone.” Apple could even give away removable stickers or possibly even sell phone carrying cases that make other phones look like an iPhone. The entire message, only an iPhone will do.
