Crowdsourcing and customer-focused innovation are very popular today. But by themselves, they're not a very good way to achieve breakthrough innovation, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner. A lot has been written on customer-centric innovation and there is an arguable case for taking this approach. However, customer-centric innovation is fraught with risk if done poorly – such as asking your customers for ideas – and seldom actually leads to breakthrough innovation. I am not going to go into detail about customer-centric innovation here, but if you are interested in knowing more, I recommend the paper, “Manage Customer-Centric Innovation Systematically” by Larry Selden and Ian C. MacMillan.
