Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

For Apple’s and Pixar’s innovators, the value of self-awareness trumped any need for customer focus. By designing for themselves, they transformed their most demanding customers.

How will a proposed innovation change our customers? What makes that change special or unique? What makes us believe that? Is that the change we really want? How do we know?

Innovation Is an Investment in Human Capital—in the Capabilities and Competencies of Your Customers. Your Future Depends on Their Future.

This offers another reason why Jobsian innovation and design-driven differentiation matter so much. While luxury firms compete for the wealthiest of the wealthy and most discriminating of the discriminating, market realities suggest remarkably little meaningful commoditization at these peaks of the pricing pyramids. No narcissism of minor differenc

Innovation is about designing customers, not just new products, new services, and new user experiences.

(Even free is too expensive if the user experience is confusing or time consuming.)

Disney’s “ask” became a fundamental design principle for the entire line: What does the innovation ask its customer to become? More like the princess she wants to be. That’s powerful. That’s profitable. That’s transformative.

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.

Google continuously improves the quality of its search by improving the capabilities of its searchers—and vice versa. As Google’s searchers grow smarter and more sophisticated, so does Google. Win/win.