Achieving innovations that allows customers to work on a task they have never thought of before is one of the key issues for a firm to pioneer a new market. In frontier business areas, not only customer's needs (what they want) are implicit but also their tasks (what they want to accomplish) are unarticulated as well. An important question in such a situation is: in what way can we pursue innovation that pioneer customer's potential task? Although there are a number of studies in R&D management which help firms to focus on the customer's existing tasks, managerial principles to promote innovations towards customer's potential tasks are still unclear in traditional arguments. In our study, we propose a model to help understand the process of concept planning and embodiment in innovation, apply it to eight cases, and compare innovations that pioneered customer's potential tasks (e.g., 3M Post-it(r) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) DNA test) with those which did not. We then suggest that, in order to discover customer's potential task during the front-end, (1) the concept planner should delegate the idea-generation role to other people, and (2) application of a unique idea should be investigated by people different from the idea-generator.
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