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In response to such an overwhelming problem, companies, universities, and governments have begun to invest heavily in green energy technologies, praying that one of them will save us, be it solar, wind, hydrogen or something yet more exotic. As ambitious and inspiring as these efforts are, such an approach on its own will never be enough.

The reason for this is simple – no idea ever makes an impact upon its inception. The first microprocessor went on sale in 1971, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that American lifestyles were transformed by the use of personal computers. The first functional automobile was demonstrated in 1801, but cars came to redefine the culture in the 20th Century, not the 19th. The electric light took a century to take hold in the American home. Quite simply, no single innovation conquers the world all at once. Prices of initial ventures are always too high, performance inevitably underwhelms, and people take a long time to warm to genuinely new-to-the-world ideas.

To achieve the necessary changes in society – and make money in the process – our opportunity today isn’t simply in the development of new technologies. Instead, it might be more important to drive the adoption of existing sustainable solutions. In so doing, we can make a major impact on our environment, create jobs, and reduce the costs of promising innovations.

In late 2007, growth strategy firm Jump Associates defined six design strategies for creating products and services optimized for success at different points in an innovation’s diffusion. Now, we’re ready to offer guidance on designing for the adoption of green products and services. In this paper, we provide best practices for companies in two very different situations: legacy players trying to understand when and how to green an existing category and pioneers seeking to accelerate the adoption of a completely new product or service. By following these strategies, companies can make green technologies profitable more quickly, renew differentiation in existing categories, and make the world a better place.

Things Take Time – An Introduction to Adoption Theory

Adoption theory is a well-established body of research into how ideas catch on. It owes its origins to communications theorist Everett Rogers’ seminal work The Diffusion of Innovations. In that text, Rogers charts the rise and fall of ideas, technologies, products and nations while teasing out the insights and principles needed to apply adoption theory to new fields.

The adoption of new ideas follows a standard bell curve. Anyone who engages with a given innovation fits into one of five categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Each of these groups has unique psychographic characteristics that cause people to be more or less likely to adopt a particular idea at a particular point in time. By understanding the needs of each group on the adoption curve, we can understand how to make an idea more appealing to different types of people.

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Originally published in Rotman Magazine, Winter 2010

On paper, Rob McEwen was an unlikely chairman and CEO for Canadian mining company Goldcorp, Inc. With a background in finance, the small, soft-spoken man with the neatly-trimmed moustache preferred meticulous tailoring to industrial machinery. But despite his appearance, McEwen was a prospector at heart: he had a fascination with gold and grew up hearing tales from his father about miners, prospectors and grubstakes at the dinner table. So smitten was he with the industry that he hammered out his own template for what he thought a 21st-century gold-mining company should look like, despite never having worked for one. In 1989, he made the leap, stepping into a takeover and becoming majority owner of under-performing Goldcorp.

Some called him crazy for buying what was regarded as a rust bucket of a company. At the time, the gold market was depressed; the mine’s operating costs were inflated and the miners were perpetually on strike. McEwen even received a death threat; but he stuck with it, because he believed the business had a promising future. “The Red Lake gold district had two operating gold mines and 13 former mines that had produced more than 18 million ounces combined,” he once said. “The mine next door had produced about 10 million ounces; ours produced only 3 million.” McEwen believed that the high-grade ore that ran through the neighboring mine was present in parts of the 55,000-acres he owned – if only he could find it.

To turn around his dream company, he needed to find new sources of value within his existing business. He had to make some very big decisions about where to dig, and he couldn’t afford to be wrong. Inspiration struck him one day at an MIT seminar, where he learned about open-source code, wide collaboration and the story of the increasingly-popular Linux operating system. McEwen realized that if he could attract world-class talent to the problem of finding more gold in Red Lake, they could potentially transform Goldcorp’s geological data to reveal the most promising places to dig. He didn’t need to get lucky: he needed new ways to see where value was hiding on his property.

The rest, of course, is history. McEwen launched the Goldcorp Challenge in March 2000, splaying the company’s proprietary geological data to the world. More than 14,000 scientists, engineers and geologists from 50 different countries downloaded the data for virtual exploration. The winner of the contest was a collaboration by two groups in Australia, Fractal Graphics and Taylor Wall & Associates, which together developed a powerful 3D graphical depiction of the mine. Goldcorp drilled four of their top five targets and struck gold on all four. This new way of looking at the business laid the foundation for McEwen to restructure Goldcorp, increasing its market capitalization from $50 million to more than $13 billion and growing its share price at a 40 per cent compound annual growth rate.

When McEwen bought Goldcorp, it was failing largely because it was unable to see where true value resided on its property. Its existing maps were insufficient, because they simply articulated previously-made discoveries, which had obvious limitations. As Albert Einstein once said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In order to renew growth at Goldcorp, McEwen needed a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. His approach of pooling experts to solve his problem is widely celebrated as a benefit of using an ‘open innovation approach’. Less-often discussed is the output from Fractal and Taylor Wall: the team crunched, reconstituted and synthesized mountains of geologic data into a wholly-new map that revealed promising new mining targets. In short, they created a map focused on finding value, rather than on verifying existing data, and in the process, they helped McEwen make savvy bets on the future growth of his company.

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Tom is a fairly likable fellow in his early thirties who, at the time of this writing, remains a bachelor. Not too long ago, Tom caught the eye of an attractive female friend we’ll call Sally. Tom really wanted to ask Sally out on a date, although he knew that the clichéd dinner and a movie might raise the stakes too high. So Tom asked her out for coffee instead. Sally said yes. Coffee was, after all, something that she could agree to easily. Going out for coffee suggested a late afternoon engagement, probably in a little café, where they could sit, talk casually, and (should things not work out) make a quick exit.

The appointed day arrived, and Tom took Sally over to the local 7-Eleven, where he proceeded to buy two styrofoam cups of joe that the two could quaff on the curb outside. Sally was outraged. How could Tom be so stupid? Clearly, when he asked Sally out for coffee, she had expected the experience of having coffee in a nice café, not just a dose of caffeine. Frustrated and disillusioned, Sally decided not to answer Tom’s repeated phone calls. To this day, our friend remains confused by the whole event.

The above anecdote is a fabrication. Most of us are able to discern the difference between having a cup of coffee and “going out for coffee.” After all, it would be absurd to think Sally’s desire to go on a date would be satisfied by a beverage. And yet, absurd as it may sound when framed as individuals, this is something that companies do to customers everyday. Take, for example, airlines that claim to have reinvented travel by creating a business-class chair that reclines to 180`. Or computer manufacturers that bring job satisfaction to the oppressed worker by introducing a faster microprocessor. Or even, for that matter, coffee purveyors who think they can put Starbucks out of business merely because their coffee tastes better.

These firms fail to realize on an organization-wide level what we all understand as individuals. People have differing types of needs, ranging from the immediate to the far-reaching. Firms seeking to solve these needs must provide a range of solutions. Some of these solutions may require improvements to individual features, while others may require massive changes in thinking. The challenge, then, is to be able to discriminate among these needs, and rigorously map out effective solutions.

All needs are not created equal
People face various challenges as they go about their daily lives. The problems they face, the goals they work to achieve, and the long-term ambitions they have can all be characterized as needs. After all, describing a situation in terms of the needs that are present is particularly useful for those who seek to change it. For our purposes, we can hold needs, wants, and desires to mean the same thing. In doing so, we recognize that there’s probably a difference between the need that one has for oxygen, the need to believe in a higher power, and the need to purchase that new BMW. All needs are not created equal.

No typology of needs can be introduced without tipping one’s hat to Abraham Maslow. It was Maslow, after all, who first succeeded in creating a coherent classification of needs that was relevant to conditions in modern society. Classifying needs from survival to self-fulfillment, Maslow’s Hierarchy isn’t specific enough to directly help product developers. It may be useful, however, to build on his work to offer a framework that is more prescriptive than descriptive.

Some human needs are purely a result of the current scenario and will disappear when the prevailing situation changes. Some needs are actually created by the solutions to other needs. The most universal needs suggest deep-seated, longer-lasting problems that may not be fixed by a single solution. In this way, needs can be characterized by their connection to current solutions, situations, or behaviors.

During the course of several design and strategy investigations, Jump Associates has had the opportunity to study a number of different types of people and the challenges they faced in the course of their daily lives. Depending on the project, we’ve studied subject groups ranging from office workers to medical equipment technicians to motorcycle enthusiasts. Direct observation, as well as interviews, gave us extensive lists of needs both individual and collective.

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Apple’s vision for digital assistants remained unrealized for the better part of a decade, until Palm Computing introduced the Pilot. Like Apple, Palm Computing had previously attempted to create a handheld desktop—the Zoomer—and had met with equally poor results. Palm decided to study Zoomer customers to get a better understanding of how people were using digital assistants. The results were unambiguous: Customers used the calendar and address book features but ignored the spreadsheet and word-processor functions. On the other hand, virtually all of them bought Zoomer’s optional link to a desktop PC. Conclusion: Users weren’t looking for a replacement for desktop computers; they wanted a replacement for their personal organizers.

Armed with this understanding, developers limited the Pilot’s feature set to simple address book and day planner functions. This strategy allowed Palm Computing to make its product small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and simple enough to start instantly at the touch of a button. By understanding the needs of its customers, the company was able to create a PDA that didn’t solve all the needs of portable computing but solved the most important ones rather well. Where Apple executives were seduced by the promise of advanced technology, Palm’s developers instead used their experience with the Zoomer to get an understanding of what their customers needed and did not need. Today, the PalmPilot is the most successful general-use PDA on the market.

The PDA story is an example of an industry struggling to characterize the needs of customers who don’t yet exist. How does a company expose these unspoken needs? Traditionally, firms have used market research methods, such as surveys and focus groups, to get information about people. These methods work well in quantifying customers’ preferences among existing solution options, but they do little to identify the needs people can’t readily articulate.

To acquire more qualitative information on customers, some companies have begun using research methods drawn from sociology and anthropology. These social research methods result in a rich description of people’s behavior, interactions, and environmental conditions. However, they tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive. In other words, they rarely focus on the needs and consequent business opportunities that customers present. For the full potential of qualitative research to be harnessed, it must be better integrated into the process of design and development. It has to link the activities of marketing with those of design professionals. And it has to focus on needs.

Needfinding

Thirty years ago, a designer named Robert McKim, who was then head of Stanford University’s product design program, was searching for a way to help designers get closer to end users. McKim noticed that the leaders in any organization were people who found important new problems to work on; they were not necessarily the ones who ultimately solved the problems. From this, he hypothesized that designers who wanted to have the greatest impact on product development needed to be involved at the earliest stages of product definition. As a response, McKim began synthesizing a qualitative research approach to studying people to identify their unmet needs. He termed this approach Needfinding.

Needfinding has developed considerably over the last three decades. At Jump Associates, we have articulated and extended the Needfinding approach in response to the growing understanding of qualitative research methods. As part of our ongoing work with internal design departments, we have helped train client organizations in the basics of Needfinding. This involved drawing on related source material from the social sciences, as well as creating new methods that complement the product design process. This article draws on much of that work, and is intended to provide an overview of Needfinding’s core methodology.

Why Focus on Needs?

Most designers intuitively understand that needs are important. They know that they do their best work solving people’s problems when they clearly understand what those problems are. However, an understanding of people’s needs can be leveraged across an entire business activity, providing value beyond the development of any single product. The points below examine how a research effort focused on needs helps companies to plan short and long-term product development and allows design managers to determine which problems they should solve first.

NEEDS LAST LONGER THAN ANY SPECIFIC SOLUTION.

Solutions come in and out of favor faster than the needs they serve. Punch cards, magnetic tape, and 5 1/4″ floppy disks have successively moved from introduction to obsolescence. However, the underlying need to store computer data has existed throughout the lives of each of those products and continues to exist today. Because people’s needs endure longer than solutions, companies should focus on satisfying those needs rather than on producing a particular product. Thinking of the company as a provider of a solution may encourage the company to continue improving that solution, but it rules out creating entirely new offerings that satisfy the need in different ways. Conversely, focusing on needs encourages companies to continue innovating better ways to serve those needs, independent of current solutions.

NEEDS ARE OPPORTUNITIES WAITING TO BE EXPLOITED, NOT GUESSES AT THE FUTURE.

Strategy and product development need not depend solely on predicting the future. A crucial part of that future already exists today. While solutions that eliminate needs do occasionally appear, the problems that currently trouble people are likely to continue into the future. Working to solve them is less risky than creating a plan around a prophecy of what tomorrow holds. By understanding people’s needs, companies can better gauge whether consumers will be interested in a new product.

NEEDS PROVIDE A ROADMAP FOR DEVELOPMENT.

Consumer needs give companies a method for determining what corporate skills and new offerings should be developed to grow their businesses. A company may not currently have the capabilities necessary to satisfy all those needs, but by identifying the ones that cannot yet be satisfied and working toward meeting them, the company can chart a future development path. Ten years ago, Eastman Kodak customer studies helped the company realize that people didn’t just want film and photo processing; their underlying need was to capture and enjoy images of daily life. Kodak developed a road map to better satisfy that need, gradually advancing into areas such as photo CDs and image manipulation software. Kodak originally knew relatively little about creating imaging software for home computers, but because such knowledge was crucial to serving its customers’ long-term needs, it developed the necessary capabilities over time.

NEEDS SPUR ACTION.

Unless it emphasizes needs, qualitative social research can only create a picture of the customer’s experience; it will not uncover ways to improve that experience. Even the most detailed description of customers’ behavior and environments won’t help product developers if it doesn’t expose opportunities for action. Once a need has been identified, designers can visualize a problem to be solved.

NEEDS ARE OBVIOUS AFTER THE FACT, NOT BEFORE.

People become acclimated to their problems, often developing work-arounds to circumvent a need. In doing so, they can become oblivious to the need’s existence.1 Again, research that relies on the customer’s description of a situation may never uncover this need. Because many needs are apparent only after they’ve been solved, research focused on needs suggests opportunities that competitors may not recognize. For example, consider India-based Bajaj Auto, the world’s largest motor-scooter manufacturer. Until recently, most Bajaj scooter owners insisted that they were happy with the way the product operated. Yet before starting a Bajaj scooter, the rider would have to tilt it to fill the eccentrically mounted engine with fuel. Bajaj owners recognized this problem only after Honda introduced a model in India with a center-mounted engine that didn’t require tilting. Honda went on to make significant inroads into the market Bajaj had previously dominated.

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