Robert Scoble has an interesting post a while back on how Google is becoming the next Microsoft. Apparently, Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, “We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people,” which Scoble takes as meaning that the chances that Google comes up with the next big thing are slim. While Google’s growth has probably caused it to sacrifice some of its innovative culture, I doubt that the quote should be taken as a negative indicator of Google’s promise.
More interestingly, Scoble quotes Henry Ford as saying, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse,” the point being that blue-skies experimentation is the key to successful innovation. I find the idea of not listening to your customers interesting, as I have always thought that a key idea in entrepreneurship is to listen to the “voice of your customer.” I guess that following Ford’s quote comes with potentially high rewards, but at a high risk, whereas listening more attentively to your customers is lower risk, but may prevent you from doing anything revolutionary.
Of course there’s also Henry Ford’s other quote: “A customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black.”
Haha, wow! I never realized that one of the greatest industrialists ever cared so little about the preferences of his customers! This reminds me of Howard Roark, from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, who thought that his customers should listen to his own tastes, rather than the other way around.
I guess, as long as you care enough about your customer’s preferences so that they continue to buy your products and you can make a profit, you are fine.
“So long as it is black” was so as to produce an affordable vehicle to the masses. Ford’s goal was that Ford’s own workers should be able to afford to buy what they produced. This implied too that they be paid enough to do that. You could argue that this set the stage for these workers’ pay and benefits to eventually become unsustainable. For decades this was hidden by increased productivity, mainly via automation.
Listening to the customer: there is listening, and listening. Innovators don’t listen to what is actually said but what is implied by inference. They said “a faster horse” which implied “get me from a to b quicker.”
Chris, I think you make excellent points, especially in your second paragraph: “Innovators don’t listen to what is actually said but what is implied by inference.”