Voice of the Customer does not necessarily equal Innovation

The tools for understanding customer needs and driving product or service business requirements are diverse and there is no one-size-fits-all tool that will work in every development instance. The article in Innovation Management by Tony Ulwick discusses where Voice of the Customer (VOC) is not an appropriate tool for innovation.

Innovation is successful when it targets customers’ needs, and yet nearly 90% of those polled in a recent IIR webinar survey reported that they had never worked on a new product in their entire career in which all the customer’s needs were known. Experts in the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) innovation technique shrug their shoulders when confronted with such facts. They say that customers do not know all their needs; customers have latent needs and needs they cannot articulate; their needs change quickly over time. We beg to differ. It is possible to know all the needs of a given customer group—it’s just that VOC has a misconception about needs, and, more fundamentally, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

The whole article is here.