Welcome to the course, customer centric innovation. Now, innovation has been an integral part of human lives since the beginning of history. It has enabled human race to find new and better ways to address and solve problems and has been central to the advancement of the human society. Think about it. We have come a far away from those cave painting, to having art galleries, from those stone tools to incredible product designs, from creation of music to the development of iPad, from trying to cross the continent to putting man on the moon and now on Mars very soon, I hope. Now, innovation and the creativity underneath it has impacted human life, society, and the world in remarkable ways. In a similar manner, innovation is the backbone of any business that exists today and I can promise you, it will be the basis of any new business that we will see in future. Now, I'm starting here with an understanding and because we are interested in this course, that we all have some sense, some idea of what innovation is and I'm sure that I will find a good degree of agreement among everyone listening to this, who has some willingness to take this course on how critical innovation is to any business. Now, that is a great starting point. Having some sense of what is innovation and that it is important, but what is customer centric innovation? Why is that the customer centric part important, critical for us as managers, as entrepreneurs, or even as consumers? Innovation could be studied and understood from an organization's perspective. How a company uses process, structure, people, etc., to enhance innovation, or we can take the technological development perspective. How a company can use their technology strategy to support their innovative processes and enhance innovative output. But what does the customer or the end-user has to do with any of this? Why should innovative process be customer centric? Can customers or end-users play or should play any role in driving or shaping a company's innovative process or innovative mindset? Should we as managers care about customers and bring their voice to innovation or new product development process? That is what we are going to talk about in this course. Essentially, we will discuss and learn four main things. First, we will talk about innovation. We will try and understand what is innovation, is simply creating something, something fabulous, something totally new to the world even and amazing never taught before product. Is that innovation? Maybe it is or maybe there is more to innovation. We will find out. Second, we will try and understand what drives innovation, what makes an innovation successful and we will do that with specific focus on customers. What role do customers play in making an innovation or the new product successful? Third, we will discuss if there is or can there be a strategy or a process for innovation development and how end-users, customers can be incorporated in that process so that it leads to innovations or products that have higher likelihood of being successful in the market. Finally, we will discuss how can we capture and utilize customer information to fuel innovation. Who is this course for? Anyone who or whose work is related to any aspect of innovation in any capacity. For example, a product manager, an engineer on a new product development team, and operations, or a process manager, a marketing manager, or even the front-line salesperson, who can bring the voice of the customer to the innovation development process. This does not have to be about dropping a physical product. The concepts we will talk about are equally important to developing services or even processes in innovative manner that have higher likelihood of being successful. You will also enjoy this course if you are someone who wants to know more about how innovation processes work and what role even we as consumers can play in development of successful products. Welcome everyone. I look forward to working with you through this course. Have a fun time and enjoy the course. Take care.
