Breakthrough Innovation
When the goal is to develop a breakthrough innovation, it is important to focus on what motivates a consumer to engage in specific behaviors that help them to accomplish their goals. Knowing how consumers decide what to do in different situations is the key to understanding these motivations, and criteria for success will ensure that the consumer will perceive your new offering as necessary to their success.

Here's how the process would play out:

Identify consumers to research: We would identify consumers who had desktop computers, but maybe didn’t use them as often as they liked. We would definitely want to interview a few people who did not use a desktop computer at all, but would value the benefits of document storage, easy file modification, and anything else the computer offered at that time.

Uncover the needs: We would observe people going through their day, and observe how they are accomplishing their tasks. We would then interview them about why they did the things we saw them doing. We would also ask about why they weren’t using the computer for more of their day-to-day tasks, especially if their motivations were consistent with the benefits the computer offered. We would also make sure we understood how they defined success in accomplishing their goals, how they chose and used different tools to help them to be more effective, and why they weren’t using the computer more often. We would also look at analogous categories of products these consumers found invaluable in getting through their day.

Define the benefits: The benefits would define an experience that would make it easier for people to accomplish their tasks. For example, we may have found that the computer tied people down and decreased their face-time with others. We may also have found that people did not like the fact that their work would pile up until they could find the time to sit at the computer, or that they did not have access to information while they were away from the office. For them, even if the current benefits of the desktop computer were valued, the duplication of steps required to realize those benefits would not be worth the time and effort.

Identify criteria and constraints: At this point the criteria for success acknowledges the value in a portable solution that enables access to information from anywhere, and the computer does not cause redundant steps. It also becomes important that the solution facilitates connections between people, rather than being an obstacle to them. This would lead to a prioritization of networking solutions to facilitate connection. Size and weight constraints would drive the development of a portable system. In essence, we begin to define the laptop computer as we know it.

Evaluate: We would evaluate potential solutions based on how well they improved a person’s ability to do their jobs. We are less concerned with how it compares to a desktop computer because it is intended to provide different benefits than the desktop computer. Consumers selected for evaluation should desire the benefits a laptop would enable. These may not be people who use current desktop computers, as they are probably satisfied with current benefits.

Conclusion
It becomes clear that while the steps are essentially the same, the focus of the work is different depending upon whether the goal is to develop an improvement or a breakthrough innovation, leading to vastly different conclusions and criteria. It can be seen that when developing an improvement, the consumer can influence the criteria development much more directly than when developing a breakthrough. The key is to clearly define the scope of the project, align expectations for how directly the consumer can influence the success criteria, and then conduct research that will solicit the right level of consumer feedback. Consumers can and should guide all of your innovation efforts, as long as you use their feedback wisely.