How can innovation be relevant?

Grant Leboff: Costas, one of the things that you talk about in the book which I really like, which I think people lose sight of, is this customer centric approach of understanding the problem and understanding the context. How does a company start to go about doing that? So that they are innovating with the customer in mind, rather than for the sake of it?

Costas Papaikonomou: That’s probably the simplest thing to achieve, and the key is to have people within the business who interact with consumers, their customers, themselves. Even if it is only once a year – ideally more often than that of course – but just interact with them personally, because say, in large blue chips, what people tend to lose sight of is the fact that how different they are from their average consumer.

I’ve worked with people who are responsible for big laundry brands, who basically work 12 hour days sitting at a desk and never do their own laundry. How are they going to know what, probably the housewife in that particular household, has as needs and motivations around getting their laundry done better? And what they rely on, instead, is second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand information in what’s actually going on in that consumer’s life. So shortening that distance, that’s really where it starts. It’s that simple. Really. There is no more to that.

Grant Leboff: So how do you achieve it? So if you’ve got your team responsible for innovation for brand development, for product development within a business, how do you create meaningful interactions?

Costas Papaikonomou: There is probably the rule of three. That you always use three different sources of information when you are working on a particular innovation task, or on a particular project, and you rotate that all the time. See you don’t do the same type of information gathering over and over, because – to paraphrase Einstein, “only a fall will believe that that then delivers new results”.

It’s literally, scheduling and interaction to happen on a regular basis. Better than just dishing it out to research teams who will then do it for you – NO – actually go out yourself to speak to people who interact with your product, who care about your product. The misunderstanding very often, is that people sit at their desk thinking that the whole world thinks that their product is as interesting as they think it is – well they don’t, and actually, heavy users don’t care about your product much either.

But there are people out there, probably about 10% of the people using your product, who actually, genuinely, care. Because they are frustrated by the category, they are looking for improvements all the time. These are the people to whom you should be talking, and they are easy to find, because they are loud. They are sitting on forums, making a noise about the category and complaining, maybe. Then it’s just a question of picking out the people who have a little bit of a creative mind, who can actually help you think about how to do it better. But you have to start by opening up a channel direct to the consumer, to that user, because otherwise is just going to be somebody else’s opinion you’re working on.

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