Not for innovation of an entirely new paradigm. The public has no idea what it wants until someone invents what it WILL want and shows it to them. That’s what Steve Jobs excelled at doing. . . and why he is credited with completely re-inventing five industries through innovation.
“There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will.” — Steve Jobs, January 2007
What Jobs did right was not rest on his laurels. I bet the phrase “But we’ve never done it that way” ever crossed his lips.
Except at church. You have to say it at church
“The public has no idea what it wants”... said every pompous inventor ever.
Inventors/mangers/investors start with a vision of what the customer WOULD WANT or WOULD NEED. I-Pod for instance was based on a want. Who would not want their entire music collection in the palm of their hands? An inventor who does not create based on a want or need will become poor very quickly.
Jobs had some failures, guess what, those failures resulted in the public not wanting or needing them. Successes were the exact opposite, the public responded to the products usefulness of their wants and needs.