It’s not what you say, it’s what you do

A couple of months back Ralph Orr wrote an interesting piece on the customers role in innovation. It presented both sides to the argument.

Here at watchmethink we have an interest in this topic. We certainly believe the videos our community are providing could be extremely useful in any companies innovation programme. We’re on Steve Portigal’s side when he says ‘People are not good at talking about solutions, but we can understand a great deal about needs by observing people‘

Observing people is what we’re all about. We encourage our community to show us how they use products and services every day via video.

We’re not asking people to tell us how to fix something and provide those answers -we’re asking people to show us the problem, or just show us how they use something. We’ve seen a number of examples already where we see our community talking throughout the video about why they’re doing, how they’re doing it etc. But the real value, in the majority of these cases, is not what they say, but what they do.

Allan Cooper, in the same article is quoted as saying, “Ikea and Apple may not ask their users what they want, but they sure work diligently to understand what their users want. There is a world of difference between the two.”

As Jeffrey Rosenberg says ‘User insights should be used as an input, not as the answer’