It’s always gratifying to congratulate ourselves on a fine piece of innovation. It feels good to know we grappled with a situation, jumped outside of the box and came up with a plan, program or product nobody else ever thought of.
But there’s a potential harsh lesson embedded in this sort of pride: If our stakeholders don’t share our perspective on the value of our plan, program or product, we actually may have taken a step backward.
Writing on HarvardBusiness.org, Scott Anthony shared a good reminder of this lesson. He wanted to deposit checks using a newly installed, technically sophisticated ATM at his Bank of America branch. When the machine’s optical-scanner wouldn’t read all of the checks and left him worse off than with the older ATM would have, he reached the conclusion that the super ATM was a good innovation for the bank, but not so hot for customers. He wrote:
“Rightly or wrongly, my check-deposit struggles left me with an image: Bank of America is innovating to help itself, not me. The general point here is to make sure you evaluate innovations through the proper lens. The trap companies often run into is they think their view of quality is the same as the market’s. That’s not always true. If the innovation isn’t perceived to be better by the consumer, customer, partner, or supplier to whom it is targeted, then adoption could slow and frustration could grow.”
Anthony is the author of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work from Harvard Business School Press.