ANY FOUNDER INTERESTED in thriving over the long term needs to be addicted to innovation. I know I am. But there’s long been debate about how best to innovate. In Silicon Valley’s earlier days, Hewlett-Packard adhered to an innovation theory called the next bench. One engineer would ask the engineer sitting on the next bench over to describe the kind of tool he would find helpful. Since HP’s customers at the time were primarily other engineers, that constituted market research. But when HP became a more consumer-focused business, the company discovered, not surprisingly, that it needed to reach out to consumers for innovation inspiration.
On the other end of the spectrum was Apple, where Steve Jobs famously noted that asking consumers what they wanted was pointless—how could they know they
