Henry Ford supposedly said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.’ This quotation is often used as an argument against relying on market research in the pursuit of innovation. Bill Gates voiced a similar thought to Ford’s when he suggested that ‘people don’t know how to want the things we can offer them’.
A glance at human behaviour makes it hard to argue against this approach. After all, most technology is what economists call an ‘experience good’ — something whose value only becomes apparent once people have tried it for themselves, like mobile telephony, Sky+ or, come to think of it, heroin. Less than 10 per cent of the population 20 years ago wanted a mobile phone, yet now there are very few who would hand theirs back.
All the same, I sometimes feel technologists could spend a little less time in blue-sky research and a little more time listening to what people say.
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