Innovation capital creates human capital creates financial capital—and vice versa. Innovation can and should be thought of as a source of capital creation.

For Apple’s and Pixar’s innovators, the value of self-awareness trumped any need for customer focus. By designing for themselves, they transformed their most demanding customers.

Drucker’s 1954 The Practice of Management declaration that “there is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer”

Customers are constantly becoming something else. They adapt. They learn. They grow. They’re not finicky consumers passively expecting markets to please, satisfy, or delight them; they’re actually dynamic collaborators and authors of their own futures. They’re not stupid; they’re skeptical. They want to make sure they’re going in the right directio

(Even free is too expensive if the user experience is confusing or time consuming.)

Training people to use shopping carts not only transformed how shoppers shopped, but increased how much shoppers bought.

Successful innovators don’t just ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different.

What tasks and requirements does the innovation ask or impose upon users?

Successful innovators don’t just ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different. Facebook asks its users to become more open and sharing with their personal information, even if they might be less extroverted in real life. Amazon turned shoppers into information-rich consumers who could share real-tim