Generating market-creating innovation by working backwards from the future

Abstract

Purpose

What is required to deliver innovation that meets evolving customer needs is a process of learning from the future.

Design/methodology/approach

The major financial gains in the digital economy usually flow from generating innovations that create entirely new markets by turning non-customers into customers.

Findings

Amazon has developed a highly productive value-creation approach called the PR/FAQ process. It starts by imagining the customer’s needs in the future and then describing in detail the offering that would meet those needs.

Practical/implications

To get more consistent success in generating market-creating innovations, explicit attention to non-users is needed.

Originality/value

Exponential advances in digital technologies, and the interactions between them, are expanding the possibilities for market-creating innovation.

Citation

Denning, S. (2021), "Generating market-creating innovation by working backwards from the future", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 49 No. 6, pp. 9-14. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-10-2021-0094