Page 97 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 201597reasons should be sought in the initial stage. An incorrect approach to the problem hampers the end result of our product or service in the long term. The main cause is an insufficient initial exploration of the context and work that is more focused on final delivery and startup than on building and developing the idea. Innovation in any sector, to paraphrase Thomas A. Edison, is 99% perspiration.Lesson two, we find that most companies/ entrepreneurs fail owing more to lack of customers than to faulty development of their product/service. It is generally forgotten who lies at the centre of our idea – people, who are closer to us. We live in a world in which we believe we know our users simply because weare capable of gathering more metrics and data (quantitative studies). However, face-to-face knowledge, which is revealing and unique, is what can provide a certain differentiation and guide our work. In this connection it is best to allow ourselves to be carried away by the tools and techniques provided by both ethnography and other qualitative social methodologies at initial stages, and carry out early validationwith users at initial stages of the projects. The idea is to work always on the basis of need/real opportunity and not just opportunity. In most projects, we customers or entrepreneurs take for granted the innate ability to develop the product in mind without yet knowing its professional experience or real technical capability: the question is not if we can build it but what it should be like, and even, going further back, if the solution should be this product or another. This should be the starting point of any project so as not to waste time building something nobody wants.Lesson three, new Voice of the Customer models are needed. Or, to put it in a more down-to-earth way, models for getting to know people in order to innovate and create new value. The traditional models and tools have the following characteristics:• Already compared facts are described through quantitative research/analysis.• The processes used are slow and established as the only plausible ones.• They are efficient in controlled markets but incapable of providing an answer to the questions raised by risky markets, especially new ones.• They concentrate on providing responses that simulate full control of all variables.• The speed of the information society is not measurable.It is necessary to know about people in order to innovate and be able to provide products and services with added value.In contrast, today we need to explore new possibilities oriented towards a more user-centred type of research that allows us to gain in-depth knowledge and identify their needs as an essential point of departure. The aim is to put ourselves in the place of the person at whomour product or service is targeted, as thoughthat person were developing it. The idea is toJuan Gasca and Jose Manuel Jarque Muñoz