Happy Mother’s Day! In a very corny and cheesy way, today’s article bridges the gap between needs and innovation. As the popular saying goes, Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
Let’s pause and consider – what does a need mean to you?
I believe we consider them to be things we want. Like food, shelter, clothes etc. But we also want phones that never need charging. We want mangoes – if you are from my family, only the alphonso mango will do from Ratnagiri. Anything else is not meeting our needs.
If you noticed, I switched between a need and a want.
Why does it matter? If we address wants, aren’t we meeting our goals? We are but understanding the difference is the key to developing long lasting innovations.
Wants are fleeting desires. Like the wind, they can keep changing. Because of their transient nature, we are fine with a good enough solution. If you wanted Belgian dark chocolate ice-cream but got a chocolate chip ice-cream, it’s fine. We’ll get it the next time. The good enough offering won because it wasn’t a pressing need.
Instead, let’s understand needs.
They come in three flavors:
- Primary – these are core needs. Example – notebooks need to have binding that doesn’t fall apart in daily use.
- Secondary – these are nice to have. Example – the paper needs to be at least 100 gsm thick. If it’s lesser also, we’d make do.
- Latent – these are golden needs that we won’t ever express. Example – the paper is textured so that it feels like papyrus. Your notes have a different quality because of it.
We all will be mostly aligned on primary needs and somewhat aligned on secondary needs. The latent needs can be different because we don’t express them fully. We may not have realized at an internal level. It’s just that when someone looked at the books we like working with, the understanding dawned.
How does this understanding help us to create products or solutions?
- Meeting primary needs is non-negotiable. That’s why every book in the bookstore has good binding.
- The secondary needs will vary. There are some books which are printed on thin paper for optimizing budget or thickness (think phone books).
- The latent needs make their way into the premium section. The folks who understand the customer base will design the solutions for this niche crowd, initially. As the product – market fit is established, the very solution will find a larger audience. Soon enough it will be a secondary and eventually could also become a primary need.
Solve for latent needs and you will realize innovations that the market enjoys.
How to spot them is a topic for another day. For now, I encourage you to look at the products you love and see if you can categorize the different features across the needs.
Happy Ideating!
Hemang.