Market Research on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Customer-Centric Innovation: Why Traditional Methods Fail

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Uncomfortable Arithmetic of Customer-Centric Innovation

Every company claims to be customer-centric. Every strategy presentation includes a slide titled “The Customer at the Center.” Every roadmap meeting features the phrase “we need to get closer to the customer.”

And yet, depending on which study you cite, somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of new products fail in the market.

If everyone is already customer-centric, why do so many innovations fail?

Quantitative Research in Innovation: Why Gut Feeling Is Not Enough

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Research That Convinced Nobody

A senior product manager at a €400M industrial equipment manufacturer spent four months on customer research. She visited fifteen customer sites across three countries. She sat in on operational shifts, watched operators use the equipment in real conditions, and conducted 90-minute interviews with the engineers, technicians, and supervisors who worked with it daily.

She came back with a detailed qualitative synthesis: themes organized into a hierarchy, representative quotes, a job map that her team spent three weeks refining, and a set of “insight areas” — customer need categories that her research suggested were underserved.

The ODI Market Definition: Why Getting the Market Right Changes Everything

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Question That Reframes Everything

“What market are you in?”

It sounds like a trivial question. Every executive has an answer ready. The VP of Marketing can recite the market definition from the last investor presentation. The VP of Product has the competitive landscape slide. Everyone in the leadership team has a clear, consistent, completely wrong picture of what market they are actually in.

Wrong is perhaps too strong. Incomplete is more accurate. But in strategy, incomplete and wrong often produce the same outcomes: innovations that solve problems nobody has in the market you defined, while the problems that actually drive customer switching behavior sit invisibly outside your competitive frame.