Video film is at URL - https://youtu.be/35ms0d3I1A0

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There are limits, of course, to push innovation. It is very powerful, but on its own has some limitations. ‘The American writer Ralph Emerson is famous for saying, ‘build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door’. Only it doesn't. In fact, although there's still a great deal of research goes into mousetraps in terms of knowledge push, almost none of it has really changed things. In terms of major innovation impact only one innovation, the old fashioned spring loaded trap, has made any serious money. So just creating things because they're possible, doesn't automatically mean they'll be successful innovations. Push creates opportunities, but it doesn't necessarily create value. And that's a theme, we're going to come back to again and again.

So we probably need to also consider the user side. Let's flip the lens now and look at demand pull.

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The key phrase here is ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. What we're trying to do is use needs - market or social – to trigger innovation.

Here is a simple example. This gentleman sees a need for transportation in the city. And he sees an opportunity for meeting that need by modifying his motorcycle. Need pull innovation.

Needs, of course, don't always have to be commercial market needs, they can also be social. And of course, we're not just talking about physical products, we're talking about services, and indeed processes. If we think about a factory, any machine that needs improvement to make it work better or more reliably is an opportunity for need pull innovation. And again, we can explore along brought our same spectrum, doing what we could do better, right the way through to doing something completely different.

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Let’s look at some illustrations. We’ve already looked at Zara, a very successful fashion retailer. Now Zara as a business is essentially all about listening to understanding user need, helping to shape those needs by doing a great deal of design work, (which is we'll see later involves getting close to users and really helping them articulate their needs). Zara’s particularly successful model is one of fast fashion, where they're able to pick up those leads, translate and turn them around to products that meet those needs in a very short space of time. In fact the cycle is around six weeks. But it's essentially a finely tuned global operation based user needs

Procter and Gamble is a much older company, but basically doing the same thing, articulating and working with needs that consumers have in their day to day lives- for cleaning, for washing, for sanitary items, for toothpaste, etc. They then work closely with their big R&D organisation to create the kinds of products that people need.

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Another example, perhaps less well known, is a company called Churchill Potteries. It began life in the Industrial Revolution in the middle of England, and its business is still producing beautiful china crockery. This chinaware is produced in part as a result of knowledge push into new ceramic technologies, but It's also very much about finding out what people need, responding to fashion, to changing habits to different lifestyles.

We've already seen the power of the Aravind Eye Care system, and here the need is social, people going blind, through untreated cataracts. They can't afford expensive health care and so there is a social need to deliver safe, reliable, low cost health innovation,

Another example, again, in the social sphere. These kids are drinking water - dirty water that would normally kill them - through a straw. A Lifestraw, which with its clever filter allows them to drink clean water. What's going on here, again, is about social need.

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Of course, there are limitations. Not everything about pull innovation is a successful story, we need to bear in mind some challenges. In particular, it's always going to be catching up to the frontier, getting closer and closer to meeting existing needs. As a result, the closer we get the more we have diminishing returns.

Perhaps more significant is the face that we are not leading the market but, by definition, following it. We try to meet what it says it needs. And that couldlead us into what I call the ‘faster horses’ problem. Faster horses? It's a famous quotation from Henry Ford.

‘If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses’.

Sometimes people can't anticipate, can't imagine what is too far from their experience. That was something Steve Jobs very much appreciated with his thinking around the personal computer and later on the smartphone and handheld devices. Moving beyond the focus group and asking people what they need and instead leading them to new possibilities.

So push and pull are both part of the equation.

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Let's try and summarise what we've been looking at in this overview sources of innovation.

First of all, there are many different sources of innovation. So we need to be very careful to search as widely as possible to find the opportunities.

Broadly, there are two classes of innovation, knowledge push, where the creation of new knowledge opens up opportunities, and demand pull when needs create innovations. Both of them are important. And innovation often arises not just because of one but as a result of these two forces working together.

It's a little bit like the blades of a pair of scissors. You can cut with one but it’s a far more effective mechanism if you use both.

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