Interesting piece in yesterday’s NYTimes Business section by Mary Tripsas on how 3M partners with its customers to drive innovation and new ideas, as opposed to driving their innovation into them with a blunt instrument: Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation. While 3M should be immediately familiar to most folks, it’s even doubly-so for software development professionals who employ lean delivery techniques since one of the acknowledged thought-leaders in the space is Mary Poppendieck, a former 3M employee.
The article references a Harvard Business School professor, Ranjay Gulati, who has recently completed a book I need to pick up: (Re)(Organize) for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. His approach is definitely in simpatico with the agile/iterative/lean philosophy:
“Being customer-driven doesn’t mean asking customers what they want and then giving it to them,” says Ranjay Gulati, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It’s about building a deep awareness of how the customer uses your product.”
This stands in stark contrast to how many firms perceive their customers, developing a homogenous view of their base through their product lines and offerings. In this environment, innovation becomes an ugly stepchild – something I’ve witnessed more and more in the industry. Gulati has seen this as well, and shares my cynical perspective:
The terms “customer driven” and “solutions” seem to be in every manager’s lexicon. But as Professor Gulati notes, “it’s an execution problem.” Companies, he says, “aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.”
And so we have the defining challenge of our industry which I am flummoxed to explain: Why we are retreating to view software development as the end-product of a manufacturing vs. creative process, especially in light of the failures the former view has wreaked.
Within MCS, I am seeing this increasingly coming to the fore with a shift toward fixed-bid projects that limit the ability of consultants to drive the kind of rich innovation Tripsas’ article describes or the deep partnerships that Gulati promotes. When we view customers as fitting or shoe-horned in to categories, we begin to constrain our thinking around our products which shutters our view of more exciting opportunities that would otherwise come to the fore.
In my opinion, if we adopt an “Innovation Center” approach as Tripsas describes, we may in fact develop a defining competitive advantage and so break out of the constraints of being organized by product and not by customer.