Performans-O-Metre

Market-creating innovations transform complicated and expensive products into products that are simple and affordable, making them accessible to a whole new segment of people -known as non-consumers- for whom there was always underlying demand, but no accessible solution. These innovations are particularly powerful because they create an abundance of jobs to serve the vast new market, and generate taxable revenue to help fund public services such as education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Equally important, the successful markets trigger an entrepreneurial culture that leads to more innovation -and by extension, development.

Today’s innovators have a similar opportunity to create new growth engines for their organizations and the countries that have been most devastated by the pandemic. While successful market-creation has traditionally been attributed to luck, this paper provides innovators with a predictable roadmap to:

1. Discover market-creating opportunities. By identifying barriers to consumption, looking for workarounds to common problems, considering aversions to situations, and reflecting on personal experiences, innovators can unlock the oceans of demand found in non-consumption.

2. Estimate the market for non-consumption. Non-consumers are often discounted based on their inability to purchase existing solutions,however there is enormous untapped potential when innovators come up with affordable and accessible solutions to everyday struggles.

3. Develop a new value network. To profitably serve non-consumers, innovators must fundamentally rethink which upstream suppliers, downstream channels to market, and ancillary providers enable a cost structure that keeps non-consumers’ needs in mind.