Two Kinds of Empathy for Successful Innovation

If you unpack the stories of most successful innovations, youll find that a
deep immersion into the user experience of a product or service is the key
that often unlocks the potential of the concept. Call it ethnography. Call it
primary research. Call it field research. Call it empathy.

For more than a decade, getting Research-and Development and Marketing

teams to go out into the context of the field has been the missing element in
the insights work that drives meaningful innovations.

Getting to know representatives that may use the products or services being
innovated and their worldview is such an inherently valuable thing to doand
its the essence of smart business, the kind that keeps its hand on the pulse
of its market.

But, its not everything.

Now, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Consumercentric, customer-centric, and user-centric studies often led to a onedimensional knowing of a complex problemand if you put too much weight
on just this primary data set, you miss other worlds of possibilities and other
insights into opportunities.

Esoteric Empathylets call it what it is. Getting inside customer (if B2B) or
consumer (if B2C) heads in the inner work that mines the psyche for
unarticulated needs in the market via their experience. For the sake of clarity,
lets call this work Esoteric Empathy, as it discerns often unspoken needs
from a relatively small group of people.

Going deep with real people can be really potent for an innovation project,
but it cannot answer all the questions that both started the project and also
arise in the course of the project. Here, we must call on a different type of
knowing to filter and frame the first-person findings. This is market
awareness, or Exoteric Empathy.

Using such tools as market sizing, competitive studies, trend data,

benchmarking of adjacent industries (and many others) gives a badly needed
context for the esoteric empathy. Lets call this data that exists in the world
Exoteric Empathy.

Wisdom is never original. Innovation is easyif you work to understand the

inner lives of your target customers and the outer forces of the market in
which they dwell and you do business. Apply both Esoteric and Exoteric
empathy to ensure a successful front end of innovation project.