Focus on understanding customers' jobs

when developping a new product or service


Finally something refreshing:

"Innovation is the process of devising solutions that address unmet needs; solutions are the means by which unmet needs (in our terminology, requirements) are satisfied. Consequently, when talking with customers to obtain their requirements, companies must focus only on capturing those requirements- and these statements must not include or make mention of a solution in any form....... We know that this is a widespread problem because many companies use scaling methods such as paired comparison and forced choice to get customers taking a survey to make trade-offs between attributes of various solutions, a practice that is totally unwarranted when trying to figure out which needs are unmet" Giving Customers a Fair Hearing; Anthony W. Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt

Blogging's role in scientific research communication

Two views on blogging for scientists from Myles Allen "Explaining science to journalists and the public on blogs is fast and efficient. But is it all just too good to be true? Can science survive Web 2.0?" and Gavin Schmidt "Scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge." via Christina Lis

Solutions and Change

This is the election year in the US and democratic candidates are using "solutions" and "change" in their campaign slogans.

To stay in the spirit of the elections, there has not been any post for a while, I wasn't campaigning with Clinton or Obama, but I've been swamped with launching a new research product (illumin8) where R&D knowledge workers can search for "solutions" (here is some illumin8 coverage) and due a "change" in my role within Elsevier and moving from one great product to another. Whatever the change is, the really simple sidi, will stay "simple" and try to continue posting time permitting....