My favorite topic in chapter 6 of the textbook is “Understanding Needs”.
This topic was so interesting to me since it enabled me to understand the meaning and importance of customers needs in a business organization. Business organizations traditionally define customer needs in a product-centric view instead of around the task the product is purchased to carry out (a customer-centric view). Therefore, the traditional approaches to capturing customer needs do not function. In simple terms, a need refers to a problem that a customer intends to solve through the purchase of a product. A customer need is not a product, idea or feature. Nor is it a statement that portrays how to make products not difficult to purchase, interface with, install or set up. It made me understand that customers do not purchase products to interface with or to set them up rather they purchase products to get a job done.
This topic is very much applicable in every business organization and for those companies that have not managed to apply it well has failed tremendously in their line of business. Understanding customer needs is the foundation of the success of a business. This can be further illustrated further by a company that sells mobile phones of which I have been one of their customers. The company is having a complete set of customer needs defined by the job to be done. This has affected positively all aspects of their innovation, including the manner their opportunities are defined, the approach they use to size and segment their markets, and the method they apply to formulate their price and product pricing strategies. These customer variables drive and guide the whole innovation process. This comprehensive and complete quality of understanding customer needs is what makes this company so powerful and enables it to come up with big ideas that win.
