The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking

A few years ago, IBM ran a great series of ads, one of which featured the striking headline, “Stop selling what you have. Start selling what they need.” Another was directed at the banking industry: “Stop thinking like a bank. Start thinking like a customer.” This is precisely the spirit of the fourth lens of innovation. It’s all about making the customer a critical starting point for idea generation.

Right up until the 1990s, P&G had a quite different approach to innovation—one that started not with the customer but in the science lab. Thousands of the company’s R&D people and engineers would work hard to develop promising new product and marketing ideas, which were then rigorously tested with market research, and finally introduced to customers with convincing arguments to persuade them to buy something they didn’t know they needed. On average, the commercial success rate of this approach was just 15 to 20 percent, meaning that only one in six new brand or product introductions would hit a home run while the rest were flops. This was actually quite a typical ratio for the consumer packaged-goods industry at the time.

Starting in 2000, when A. G. Lafley took over as CEO, things began to change. One of the first things Lafley did was to create a simple but powerful new mantra that fundamentally shifted the focus of the organization: “The Consumer Is Boss.”⁹⁶ In a series of town ...