.Dust

This morn­ing I was fly­ing from Milan to Rome and, as always, I was look­ing at which mobile phones peo­ple were using and at what they were doing with their mobiles.

I always do this kind of exer­cise while I found myself in a crowdy place. You will always learn something.

I was in an air­port ad that should be a sit­u­a­tion where you may find a lot of high edu­cated peo­ple, high spenders and, usu­ally, early tech­nol­ogy adopters.

I have noticed three peo­ple with new mobile phones con­sult­ing their agenda to dial a number.

This is quite inter­est­ing. They, or their com­pany, spent the money to acquire a high end, just released mobile phones and they are still using the agenda to look at a phone num­ber to dial it. Really. I mean, the old paper agenda with a con­tact list at the end of the diary.

I felt quite sad look­ing at them.

We try every sin­gle day to push new ser­vices and new stuff in mobile phones and peo­ple does not use them. I am push­ing this to the extreme, I know.

What is the really issue here ? There are sev­eral answers to this question.

Maybe the mobile is only a sta­tus sym­bol ad because of this you tend to always the lat­est model avail­able on the mar­ket. This may be a good expla­na­tion of what I saw, spe­cially in the Ital­ian mar­ket that is so sen­si­ble to this kind of issues.

Another expla­na­tion is that we make things too dif­fi­cult for the end user to learn or, sim­ply, they do not need them. Can this be the case of the con­tact list? This appli­ca­tion has been sit­ting on mobile phone since the begin­ning. I can­not imag­ine that some peo­ple could not be aware of the pres­ence of such appli­ca­tion on their phone.

Any­way this was quite con­fus­ing, and scar­ing and I was won­der­ing if we are going to the right direc­tion. Prob­a­bly yes, but, what we are doing in not really enough.

If you want to push new appli­ca­tions and ser­vices you need to edu­cate your cus­tomer. Installing appli­ca­tion on the mobile phone is no more enough in order to make them grow with you. You need to have an inno­va­tion plan to make your com­pany grow but you also need to have an edu­ca­tion inno­va­tion plan to hit the mar­ket and edu­cate your customer.

The per­fect sce­nario for this should be lis­ten­ing to cus­tomers, look­ing at what they are doing with your prod­ucts and ser­vices and try­ing to find the best way to make them learn what you are doing.

Why do I blog this? Sort of a per­sonal note.

Related posts:

1. Inno­va­tion is everywhere
2. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation
3. The four dri­vers of innovation
4. From Gen­e­sis to Rev­e­la­tion to Innovation
5. Vir­tual reports and innovation