Creating a culture of innovation is all about observing your customers and understanding their problems, coming up with new ideas and innovations, recognizing that more than 50% will fail and celebrating that failure as a chance to learn (Yes, Intuit celebrates failure - they have the "greatest failure award"), and for management to stay out the way. Scott quoted from Drucker about how manager's have to be on their guard not to stifle innovation. He related a personal story that when his team came back from observing customers and wanted to ship hardware and software, he said "but we're a software company". Eventually his team wore him down.
The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.
Peter Drucker
Scott cautioned against large sets of quantitative data especially from survey data where we ask questions based on current company thinking. These won't lead to innovation.
Antonella Pavese has posted her notes of Scott's presentation and wraps up her summary with this:
We should never ask customers what they want, we should use customers to understand what the problem is. Customers are not going to provide the solutions; solutions need to be built by a skilled team that has a deep understanding of the problem.
CHI2006 | innovation | computer human interaction
