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Companies Are Brilliantly Solving the Wrong Problems

Why making a better product can sometimes sink your company

Jasper Kroese
Marker
6 min readFeb 10, 2020

Photo: Kelvin Murray

“I“I’m a problem solver,” the innovation manager at my first job used to say. “You give me a problem, I’ll give you a solution. That’s why people keep hiring me.”

He was right on all counts. People gave him problems, he solved those problems, and people kept hiring him. However, the more I got into the science of innovating, the more I realized this innovation manager wasn’t actually innovating at all. Sure, he would do whatever people told him to — but he never knew why he was doing it. He took the problem as a given. And most of the time, that meant he did a great job solving the wrong problems.

My manager was far from the exception. Companies have generally become very good at solving the wrong problems. What I mean by this is that most companies fail to uncover what their actual problems are — or where their real opportunities lie, and they excel at solving the problems they do uncover, simply because it taps into their existing knowledge, experience, and skills.

Addressing the wrong problems

BlackBerry continued to improve its physical keyboards because it wanted to focus on business emails. Kodak didn’t recognize its own invention of…

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Jasper Kroese
Jasper Kroese

Written by Jasper Kroese

Freelance Consultant — Driven by innovation, product development, startups and creating future-proof organizations

Responses (11)

What are your thoughts?

Brilliant piece, Jasper! This is particularly valuable— knowledge often stands in the way of our understanding.
"The difficulty in most industries is that you’re not the only one that’s caught in your biased views: so are your company leaders, your…

You are absolutely correct. I was a career problem solver--cultural change agent. But it is not only business, tragically it is also our health care system.
The simplest of examples: Have a fever, reduce the fever--all the while the fever is actually…

Obviously, there’s no single explanation for why companies fail to recognize their biggest problems or greatest opportunities.

One of the common explanations is the entrenchment of thought — new product decisions are often made by people with 20–30 years of experience in an industry. Hard to have outside the box thinking in those scenarios if they are of a forceful management style, unfortunately.