Customers are constantly becoming something else. They adapt. They learn. They grow. They’re not finicky consumers passively expecting markets to please, satisfy, or delight them; they’re actually dynamic collaborators and authors of their own futures. They’re not stupid; they’re skeptical. They want to make sure they’re going in the right

The “being one’s own best innovator/customer” paradigm enjoys a fantastic business history. Henry Ford, George Eastman, and Edwin Land were all DIFY—do it for yourself—entrepreneurs.

If the purpose of business is to transform a customer, then the purpose of The Ask is determining and detailing the dimensions of that transformation.

Innovation generates a new wealth of human capital. Successful innovations are successful investments in the human capital stock of customers.

Marketing myopia prevented the industry from seeing what business it was really in. To succeed, Levitt maintained, “The entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions . . . In short, the

Apple trained its customers to become design connoisseurs.

What do little girls want to become?

Innovation capital creates human capital creates financial capital—and vice versa. Innovation can and should be thought of as a source of capital creation.

But the dark side of The Ask is not about the innovation’s riskiness but the customer weaknesses and vulnerabilities that innovation might expose.