By doing so, an elite group of companies has enabled their employees to more rapidly address customer problems, anticipate unarticulated needs and drive customer-facing innovation.
What impressed me about design researchers such as Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO was the dedication to really observing and paying close attention to people — because this is usually the best way to ferret out their deep, unarticulated needs.
In "Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design" (HBR November December 1997), I advanced the notion that especially when customers are unaware of their behavior, observation can help uncover their unarticulated needs.
Having a deep sense of customers' unmet and unarticulated needs must drive our innovation.
It's important to understand that game-changing innovations originate from uncovering unarticulated needs of existing customers and target customers.
The methodology was aimed at tapping the latent, unarticulated needs of the consumers (something that they do not say but still have).
Microsoft's Satya Nadella believes that empathy is a key source of business innovation and is a prerequisite for one's ability to "grasp customers' un-met, unarticulated needs".
"People from all over the world are thinking about how do I use technology, how do i learn new concepts, but then more importantly, how do I solve some of these unmet, unarticulated needs?
High market risk - low technology risk: Human Centered Design Here, the design team, together with anthropologists (study of humanity), ethnographers (study of people and cultures), design and brand strategists, as well as, ergonomists, conduct user interviews and studies of users in the field to uncover unarticulated needs and/or clarifying existing needs.
Rather, it is the unarticulated demand consumers have for solutions they didn't realize they were seeking.
