michael schrage

who-your-customers-want-to-become

SARAH GREEN: But then, the framing question that you've been giving is who do you want your customers to become. And you've talked about designing customers. So which is it? Are you just recognizing what they want? Or are you actively molding them?
MICHAEL SCHRAGE: Ah, well, I think that is-- if you'll forgive me for saying this-- a brilliant question. If you gave me the choice as an entrepreneur between identifying what customers seem to be predisposed to becoming and innovating to enable, that seems to be a very good innovation path.
But let's say you want to transform your customer. Let's say you're somebody like, oh, let's pull a name out of a hat, Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin and Larry Page from Google. Then, you're using your technology competence, your technological superiority, to transform a customer. ....

You have a vision of the technology that transcends what the customer could think or know that they want.

But I am going to proceed under the happy and hopeful assumption that, on balance, the innovators I'm addressing in this book are predisposed to being ethical and moral when they make a value offering to transform their customers. And let's also be fair. Reasonable people can disagree on issues of morals and ethics in certain commercial spheres.