Intuit's success

I don't think that this will fly with my strategy colleagues and my managers, but I love when someone else states that:

" So any business plan I build will be based on gut instincts and experience.”

This is how Janna Eggers, Intuit QuickBase General Manager, is approaching to innovation at Intuit a $2.3Billion company.

"Despite her [Janna Eggers] focus on tying innovation directly to the product line, Intuit’s Eggers says she doesn’t worry about sizing the market or projecting revenue for a new product or feature....“[We talk] about figuring out what jobs you’re solving for and how painful they are. People get too caught up in, ‘What’s the market size for this?’ rather than saying, ‘Forget market sizes and product categories, and let’s look around for pains.’”via 360

That's what we need to figure out at Elsevier too: to find the pain points of our customers and churn out products (alphas, betas) to solve these issues