Empathic Design

What customers can't tell you might be just what
you need to develop successful new products.

SPARK INNOVATION
THROUGH
EMPATHIC DESIGN

BY DOROTHY LEONARD AND JEFFREY F. RAYPORT

ALMOST EVERY COMPANY COMPETES to some degree on the basis of continual innovation. And to be commercially successful, new product and service ideas must, of course, meet a real-or perceived-customer need. Hencethe current managerial mantras: "Get close to the customer" and "Listen to the voice of the customer." The problem is, customers' ability to guide the development of new products and services is limited by their experience and their ability to imagine and describe possible innovations. How can companies identify needs that customers themselves may not recognize? How can designers develop ways tomeet those needs, if even in the course of extensive market research, customers never mention their desires because they assume those desires can't he fulfilled?

A set of techniques we call empathic design can help resolve those dilemmas. At its foundation is observation-watching consumers use products or services. But unlike in focus groups, usability laboratories, and other contexts oftraditional market research, such observation is conducted in the customer's own environment-in the course of normal, everyday routines. In such a context, researchers can gain access to a host of information that is not accessible through other observation-oriented research methods.


The techniques of empathic design-gathering, analyzing, and applying information gleaned from observation in thefield-are familiar to top engineering/design companies and to a few forward-thinking manufacturers, but they are not common practice. Nor are they taught in marketing courses, being more akin to anthropology than marketing science.

Sometimes, customers are so accustomed to current conditions that they don't think to ask for a new solution.

In fact, few companies are set up to employ empathicdesign; the techniques require unusual collaborative skills that many organizations have not developed. Market researchers generally use text or numbers to spark ideas for new products, but empathic designers use visual information as well. Traditional researchers are generally trained to gather data in relative isolation from other disciplines; empathic design demands creative interactions amongmembers of an interdisciplinary team.

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Dorothy Leonard is the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Boston. Massachusetts. Her teaching, research, and consulting focus on creativity, innovative knowledge management as a core capability, and new-product development.Her book Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation was published in 1995 by the Harvard Business School Press.

Jeffrey F. Rayport is an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on the impact on new information technologies on service-marketing strategies for information- intensive companies.----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Developing the expertise, however, is a worthy investment. Empathic design is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to identify potentially critical customer needs. It's an important source of new product ideas, and it has the potential to redirect a company's technological capabilities toward entirely new businesses.

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