Coming Soon — In Search of Innovative Problems

IN the coming weeks, we will be publishing a new framework for understanding and identifying innovative problems. Innovative problems are the ones that customers never see or can’t articulate. Steve Jobs hinted at this when he said, “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

We (see who ‘we’ are below) will be looking at companies and leaders who were able to identify innovative problems and create valuable market differentiation and competitive advantage. We’ll give you a framework for analyzing problems; a set of signposts that appear when innovative problems are near; and a repeatable methodology for finding these valuable problems.

We've been hard at work on this for quite some time and we’re excited about sharing our learning with you. We want to encourage discussion and participation in expanding and developing the concepts we will be sharing. We’d love to publish your contributions and comments on the topic here at Innovation Nation once we have released the complete framework, which we will share in serialized form over several weeks.

And once the framework is published, we will be carrying on a continuing dialog with newly discovered examples of innovative problems and more leading thinking on problem identification and innovation. We invite you to participate with us.

We are Brian Leitten and Brad Strock. We began this quest for understanding problem finding when we worked together at Hillenbrand Industries, now Hill-Rom Holdings and then a Fortune 500 company. We worked together on acquisitions, startups and growth strategy. Brad went on to help companies like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America transform their customer service experiences through disruptive technologies. He is currently Vice President of Global Operations for PayPal, an eBay Inc. company. Brian ran startups and mid-size growth businesses and, for the last decade, has led private equity and consulting businesses helping promising businesses grow and prosper.