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The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand
Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand and building successful innovations around it.
Most innovators are stuck, whether or not they realize it. They want their innovations to become part of the lives of their customers, clients, or beneficiaries. But people are already coping with their busy lives; new ideas and inventions rarely spark any change at all.
At the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech, the authors have worked with scores of startups and large companies, developing a unique methodology that unpacks the “black box” of authentic demand and shows innovators how to search for it, recognize it, and create situations for their customers that catalyze it. They explore the differences, and different challenges, to the three types of innovation—incremental improvement, company transformation, and radical “formative” innovation.
Authors Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman take innovators and people who work with them on a new journey through innovation. Their fresh case studies, from IBM’s entry to the Web, to a single mother in a slum in Kenya, make The Heart of Innovation as obsessively readable as it is informative.
If customers are already pulling your innovation from your hands, you don’t need this book. Otherwise, reach for The Heart of Innovation.
208 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2023
16 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 7, 2023
The premise for this book is only revealed to us at the end when the authors summarize the notion that their career pursuits have been to get to the heart – the essence or core – of innovation and their belief that innovation has a heart. It does have a heart, figuratively and literally, and the authors have exposed it to show how it can beat. However, despite the deep experience this quartet brings, their solution for innovating is not the only one entrepreneurs can pursue. This book should be studied in the broader context of building a customer discovery framework will all the resources one can muster.
Indeed, the authors bring decades of experience from the startup space within Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and IBM. This experience can certainly be a benefit to others. However, the use of a new model of customer discovery can and should be presented without disparaging the work of successful business leaders such as Steve Blank and Alexander Osterwalder. Blank’s approach to lean startup (fail early) is acknowledged but dismissed. Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, another the target of criticism, has successfully aided the launch of hundreds of companies and has been the model for the successful start-up program within the National Science Foundation. A preferred approach would be to acknowledge the benefits of work that has gone on before rather than discount one method in favor of one’s own. Successful innovators know to develop a both-and approach, taking advantage of all the tools at hand.
The book is divided into two parts, “accidental” innovation and “deliberate” innovation. In the first section, we are presented with a thesis that there are three types of innovation: informative, transformative, and formative. These definitions and examples to support them are reasonable and soundly presented. In the second section, the authors step into the idea that their model is to be promoted at the expense of others. The mark of a strong leader is the ability to take inputs from a variety of sources and synthesize those inputs into one informed decision. To suggest one methodology and ignoring all others is, at best, narrow-minded and, at worst, fatal to a new venture or a new idea.
The book also has some worn ideas that are simply not valid. For example, in the Introduction, they make the statement at “Marketers market what they are given, or on the basis of theories about the product they’ve been given.” This is simply not true. Good marketers will identify a pain point for a customer and seek solutions to alleviate that pain. Sales people may sell what they have been given but sales and marketing are not the same. One would think that these authors with their pedigrees would know the difference.
On the positive side, there are some concepts that are succinct and well presented. The idea that target customers will not not take action to avoid an unpleasant outcome is important to recognize. This is an excellent way to characterize the pain that a customer wants to avoid and makes the innovator think about how to present a solution to address this need.
Probably the most significant contribution of the book is the introduction to Documented Primary Interactions (DPIs). This method for capturing the interaction with potential customers is a tool that can help steer an innovator to finding the best solution to a customer’s problem (which, by the way, is called “marketing” and has nothing to do with presenting what you are given). An extensive index presents a method for using the DPI process and the innovator would be well served in considering this as a tool.
In the realm of business literature and methods to deliberately innovate, The Heart of Innovation is a useful contribution. It is an important addition to helping innovators find solutions to customer problems – just not at the exclusion of others.
Indeed, the authors bring decades of experience from the startup space within Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and IBM. This experience can certainly be a benefit to others. However, the use of a new model of customer discovery can and should be presented without disparaging the work of successful business leaders such as Steve Blank and Alexander Osterwalder. Blank’s approach to lean startup (fail early) is acknowledged but dismissed. Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, another the target of criticism, has successfully aided the launch of hundreds of companies and has been the model for the successful start-up program within the National Science Foundation. A preferred approach would be to acknowledge the benefits of work that has gone on before rather than discount one method in favor of one’s own. Successful innovators know to develop a both-and approach, taking advantage of all the tools at hand.
The book is divided into two parts, “accidental” innovation and “deliberate” innovation. In the first section, we are presented with a thesis that there are three types of innovation: informative, transformative, and formative. These definitions and examples to support them are reasonable and soundly presented. In the second section, the authors step into the idea that their model is to be promoted at the expense of others. The mark of a strong leader is the ability to take inputs from a variety of sources and synthesize those inputs into one informed decision. To suggest one methodology and ignoring all others is, at best, narrow-minded and, at worst, fatal to a new venture or a new idea.
The book also has some worn ideas that are simply not valid. For example, in the Introduction, they make the statement at “Marketers market what they are given, or on the basis of theories about the product they’ve been given.” This is simply not true. Good marketers will identify a pain point for a customer and seek solutions to alleviate that pain. Sales people may sell what they have been given but sales and marketing are not the same. One would think that these authors with their pedigrees would know the difference.
On the positive side, there are some concepts that are succinct and well presented. The idea that target customers will not not take action to avoid an unpleasant outcome is important to recognize. This is an excellent way to characterize the pain that a customer wants to avoid and makes the innovator think about how to present a solution to address this need.
Probably the most significant contribution of the book is the introduction to Documented Primary Interactions (DPIs). This method for capturing the interaction with potential customers is a tool that can help steer an innovator to finding the best solution to a customer’s problem (which, by the way, is called “marketing” and has nothing to do with presenting what you are given). An extensive index presents a method for using the DPI process and the innovator would be well served in considering this as a tool.
In the realm of business literature and methods to deliberately innovate, The Heart of Innovation is a useful contribution. It is an important addition to helping innovators find solutions to customer problems – just not at the exclusion of others.
March 30, 2025
Read this one for my company's "book club" because it was recommended to my boss by some guy he follows on LinkedIn (classic). I actually enjoyed it more than I expected to, but I thought that the second half of the book (the "intentionally discovering authentic demand" bit) was lacking in believability. Even the guidelines they laid out for discovering authentic demand seemed to rely just as much on luck as the stories laid out in the first half (about accidentally discovering demand).
Just a longwinded way of saying that I thought the book had occasional nuggets of wisdom and thought provoking ideas but may have been better off with a little more editorial oversight.
Just a longwinded way of saying that I thought the book had occasional nuggets of wisdom and thought provoking ideas but may have been better off with a little more editorial oversight.
November 13, 2025
- nice to read a book with a purpose… specifically fashioning the advice to find “authentic demand” of students in MSE has been useful
- this book is disproportionately stories the rely on “right place right time” but its made enough effort to address that
- part II offered enough good frameworks that can be applied
- advice is applicable to start-ups as much as your own growth and thinking about what matters
- this book is disproportionately stories the rely on “right place right time” but its made enough effort to address that
- part II offered enough good frameworks that can be applied
- advice is applicable to start-ups as much as your own growth and thinking about what matters
November 7, 2023
Looking for unique insights to innovation or maybe you just need a fresh prospective; then check out The Heart of Innovation; A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand by Matt Chanoff, Merrick Furst, Daniel Sabbah, and Mark Wegman. It’s not just for innovators. The authors offer compelling, actionable insights to the innovation process that you can apply to your change process.
March 28, 2025
Some novel ideas around how to spot true demand. Arguments against the obsession of features and benefits. Encourages focusing on human habits and needs instead of wants. Good points about selling to situations not psychographics or characteristics.
A lot of anecdotal verbiage and frameworks
A lot of anecdotal verbiage and frameworks
September 11, 2025
I found this book to be a little middling in that it didn't offer me anything unique. It makes a big deal of "authentic demand" as a buzzword but then it doesn't define that in a way that is particularly enlightening.
January 13, 2024
Interesting content, written like a book for university’s, I couldn’t enjoy reading it.
Read
February 20, 2024Need to find “authentic demand”, uncover customer needs through the “not not principle.”
June 13, 2024
Great book from many perspectives. Number one is the thought that unconditional positive regard can transform a team and move them toward innovative solutions. Definitely worth reading!
November 3, 2023
I was really impressed with this book. It is on a vital subject, but I’ve not seen the subject covered in this much detail before. It was for me rather technical, but I owe that to my lack of expertise in the area.
Part one, the authors lay a case with the high rate of entrepreneurial failure, then describes a process for improving your chances of success.
Part two is a detailed explanation of how the process should be implemented, and, of course, with ties inside to their business.
This seemed to me to be a very common sense approach to determining the market for a new product or process.
Important reading for any entrepreneur looking to improve their chances of succeeding in today’s business world. There are also applications for non profit organizations and universities.
Very highly recommended.
Part one, the authors lay a case with the high rate of entrepreneurial failure, then describes a process for improving your chances of success.
Part two is a detailed explanation of how the process should be implemented, and, of course, with ties inside to their business.
This seemed to me to be a very common sense approach to determining the market for a new product or process.
Important reading for any entrepreneur looking to improve their chances of succeeding in today’s business world. There are also applications for non profit organizations and universities.
Very highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews