Had an interesting lecture today about Intuit – still the world´s most admired company in the computer software industry. Bill Ihrie told us about their innovation program – Customer Driven Innovation.
First of all, they seem to have an impressive market shares – around 80% for most of their products. The 10 year growth rate of about 20% may take a hit in these days – but then again, we still need to do our taxes, right…
Their innovation program seems to be centered around finding unsolved customer problems and solving them – not too revolutionary… But I guess they must be doing something a little bit different – and I think that the customer studies (observations of customer behavior) might just be it. While many tend to rely on experts, it seems that Intuit has a habit of making observations and focusing on just the right pain points – the ones that make their products more valuable to their customers.
The holistic thinking they applied to the Point-of-sale product is another good example of innovation that led Intuit into a new market – that of hardware sales. QuickBooks is another innovative product that made accounting available to people who don´t have a clue about debit and credit. And with the worst possible product launch (I honestly think they made all the possible errors) they still made it to the top – amazing…
The recipe is: 1) Slack, 2) Promote Cross-functionalism, 3) Invest in good times, 4) See results before you scale
With 10% unstructured time, their employees work on projects that they are passionate about – an investment in employee satisfaction as well as growth through innovation. Many examples show that the unstructured time has come up with useful features in existing products, although writely was one good one that slip out under the radar…
To succeed you need to have persistence (constant attention and recurring innovation events) combined with top management attention that protects employee´s unstructured time. Amen.
