A meeting I had recently with some folks at Gillette highlighted an important issue facing the would-be innovator — the "curse of knowledge."
Chip and Dan Heath described the curse of knowledge nicely in their 2007 book Made to Stick (highly recommended to all innovators). The basic problem: people who have deep knowledge about a topic sometimes assume other people have that same knowledge. That can lead to major missteps.
The brothers Heath bring this to life by describing a simple experiment run by a Stanford doctoral candidate in the early 1990s. The researcher gave subjects a list of popular songs like "Happy Birthday" and asked them to tap those songs out on a table. Another person had to guess the songs. The researcher asked the "tapper" to predict the percent of songs the "listener" would guess correctly.
The tappers — who could hear the song in their heads as they tapped — assumed that people would get 50 percent right. They actually got 2.5 percent right.
What does this mean for innovation? Managers who have spent their entire lives working in an industry often suffer from the curse of knowledge. They assume customers know more than they do. This curse can blind managers to opportunities and threats.
During my meeting at Gillette, one group member described how "of course" the last place you should shave is around your mouth. As I tend to shave my chin last, I asked him why.
"Well, that part of the face has the most nerve endings," he explained. "So you need to give more time for your shave prep [lotion or gel] to work."
As that was news to me, I wondered if I was alone in my naivety. So I launched a quick survey.
Read the rest at Scott's Havard Management blog, Innovation Insights.
