Pioneering Customer´s Potential Task in Innovation: Separation of Idea-Generator and Concept-Planner in Front-End

Achieving innovations that allows customers to work on a task they have never thought of before is one of the key issues for a firm to pioneer a new market. In frontier business areas, not only customer´s needs (what they want) are implicit but also their tasks (what they want to accomplish) are unarticulated as well. An important question in such a situation is: in what way can we pursue innovation that pioneer customer´s potential task? Although there are a number of studies in R&D management which help firms to focus on the customer´s existing tasks, managerial principles to promote innovations towards customer´s potential tasks are still unclear in traditional arguments. In our study, we propose a model to help understand the process of concept planning and embodiment in innovation, apply it to eight cases, and compare innovations that pioneered customer´s potential tasks (e.g., 3M Post-itreg and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) DNA test) with those which did not. We then suggest that, in order to discover customer´s potential task during the front-end, (1) the concept planner should delegate the idea-generation role to other people, and (2) application of a unique idea should be investigated by people different from the idea-generator