SPARK INNOVATION THROUGH EMPATHIC DESIGN

Companies are used to bringing in customers to participate in focus gr oups, usability laboratories, and market research surveys in order to help in the development of new products and services. And for improvin g products that customers know well, those tools are highly sophistica ted. For example, knowledgeable customers are adept at identifying the specific scent of leather they expect in a luxury vehicle or at helpi ng to tune the sound of a motorcycle engine to just the timbre that ev okes feelings of power. But to go beyond improvements to the familiar, companies need to identify and meet needs that customers may not yet recognize. To accomplish that task, a set of techniques called empathi c design can help. Rather than bring the customers to the company, emp athic design calls for company representatives to watch customers usin g products and services in the context of their own environments. By d oing so, managers can often identify unexpected uses for their product s, just as the product manager of a cooking oil did when he observed a neighbor spraying the oil on the blades of a lawn mower to reduce gra ss buildup. They can also uncover problems that customers don't mentio n in surveys, as the president of Nissan Design did when he watched a couple struggling to remove the backseat of a competitor's minivan in order to transport a couch. The five-step process Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport describe in detail is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to identify customer needs, and it has the potential to redirect a company's existing technological capabilities toward entirely new bus inesses.