The Honeywell Integrated Security (HIS) End Users Committee has been getting a lot of attention lately. Built independently by end users, the committee is based on the concept that the customer is always right.
Honeywell has taken the concept one step further by embracing the committee, whose members say that 25-30 percent of the feature sets in the company’s product offerings come directly from the group. Though it is an interesting implementation of an age-old concept, is Honeywell taking it too literally? After all, the largest company in the world (Apple) was built on the exact opposite model.
The Honeywell committee was founded several years ago to create a structured system for providing customer feedback directly to Honeywell’s design and engineering teams. The committee has more than 90 members, not one of whom is in any way a paid employee of Honeywell.
Members of the committee have structured meetings where feedback is collected and then distributed to Honeywell for consideration and implementation into new products. Though the system seems to be effective in providing end users with what they want, it may also be stifling innovation.
Apple, arguably one of the most successfully innovative companies of all time, used a different approach when it came to market research. The company ignored it. Steve Jobs once said: “A lot of times, customers don’t know what they want until you show them.”
Studying market research and customer feedback might provide businesses with a safe method of pleasing and maintaining current clientele, but it is not the kind of strategy that will lead to truly innovative products.
Honeywell did not create the end-user committee, but the company clearly supports it. The concern is that Honeywell will become overly reliant on the committee to fuel innovation. Even spending too much time analyzing this research could become a very unproductive process.
If Apple had created an end-user committee for the iPod and relied on the committee to provide feedback for engineers and developers, we never would have seen the iPhone or iPad. Jobs would have been so distracted trying to store more music on a smaller device that he would never have thought of combining a telephone with it or transferring that technology to revolutionize the tablet. As a visionary, he had to ignore consumer demands and look ahead.
Though Honeywell’s end-user committee seems to be having some positive effect on product development, I would caution Honeywell about relying too heavily on feedback. Living off comment cards might please consumers, but it is a reactive way of doing business.
To be truly innovative, Honeywell will need to look beyond what consumers want and give them something unexpected. In the words of Jobs: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
Free Download: The Video Surveillance Report 2023
Discover the latest developments in the rapidly-evolving video surveillance sector by downloading the 2023 Video Surveillance Report. Over 500 responses to our survey, which come from integrators to consultants and heads of security, inform our analysis of the latest trends including AI, the state of the video surveillance market, uptake of the cloud, and the wider economic and geopolitical events impacting the sector!
Download for FREE to discover top industry insight around the latest innovations in video surveillance systems.
