Another great 37signal article talking about innovation which tries to address the idea that sometime you have to move a little outside the box, even if it makes people a bit uncomfortable.
“Companies that lead need to be willing to say that occasional growing pains are ok. If a company only listens to what customers think they need, it won’t be able to innovate. As Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
This feels like a conversation I had last week with some people in my company talking about different forms of searching. I wanted to push the user into using tag clouds for search – they wanted to use more traditional methods like search box and drop down boxes.
Sometimes it is hard to change. 🙂