The re-positioning of many traditional market research departments as “insight” providers has made a lesser contribution to successful innovation than might have been expected.
There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps the main one being that supposed “insights” often result from looking into what is in effect a rear-view-mirror.
What is needed, of course, is a way of walking into the future (together with customers, consumers, suppliers, experts etc) and gaining insights from that perspective. I think this is better described as “foresight”. And it’s not a good fit with people who have a strongly rational and logical cast of mind.
After all, nobody knows exactly what the future will hold. What we do know is that it will be different from the past. So walking into it is fundamentally an imaginative exercise – a new perspective from which fresh innovations can be created. And to do it well, it needs radically different methods.
To adapt LP Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his novel, The Go-Between: “The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.”
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