079: Speculative use cases

We talk about a question posed in Innovation Tactics Slack - about a stakeholder who’s skeptical that design research can help with genuine innovation, and wants to create speculative use cases instead.

Topics we touch on:

• Are speculative use cases a "thing"? Is it helpful to imagine people doing something that's just not happening today? Like, 500 years ago, nobody got their shoelace trapped in an escalator. In 2003, nobody was planning out how they'd price their product on the App Store.
• Is it reasonable to be skeptical about design research?
• What do you do when you're working with someone who's already decided what they want and isn't interested in evidence?
• Radical repurposing as an alternative – follow the pathfinders
• Snowmobiling as a possible approach – remix the adjacent possible
• Jamming with your stakeholder to understand and clarify (with the side effect that you might expose gaps or incoherence)
• Bias in research

Some quotes:

"Getting a shoelace trapped in an escalator - that's not a thing that happened 500 years ago."

"Just doing something because you think it's cool is totally valid as a way of operating a business"

"Everyone who has a brilliant idea thinks that their idea is the next big thing. And everyone but one in a million is wrong about that. And even the one in a million tends to be wrong about exactly how it's going to work."

"Play Doh was invented, not as a toy for kids, but as a putty for removing coal soot from walls. It was repurposed into the kids' toy after people stopped having coal fires"

"You're very unlikely to invent something novel that works. You're very likely to find somebody doing something novel that you can scale."

"You can absolutely go and do the best interviewing in the world and not come back with anything that's going to be a breakthrough innovation for your company. It may be that your company is not positioned to make a breakthrough innovation."

"this is the trap that so many people fall into and I've heard it more times than I can count. It's that need to educate the market. Do not, do not try, red flag, back away slowly or run, run speedily off into the distance."

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