What's the problem?

For the last year or so, LinkedIn has been awash with fantastical claims from consultants and agencies about how the Metaverse will be worth $5tn by 2030, how NFTs will revolutionise customer engagement and how Web3 will transform e-commerce.

Adding chlorine trifluoride to this hellscape, there has also been an inverse correlation between the adoption of ChatGPT and the helpfulness of LinkedIn more generally, as the same grifters use AI to write these fallacious think pieces for them.

While it'd be easy to dismiss their claims as internet landfill, the challenge this discourse presents for you as a strategy and innovation professional is real - because once these fanciful notions enter the corporate zeitgeist, the inevitable question arises from your leadership and executive teams:

"What's our Metaverse/NFT/Web3 strategy?"

And now, you're tasked with finding problems for these emerging technologies to solve. And by trying to find problemsfor solutions rather than solutions to problems, you'll likely run into a few problems yourself:

1. Humans and financial capital will be thinly spread across innumerable potential applications.
2. Very few (if any) of the propositions you develop will find market traction because there's no defined customer need.
3. You'll find yourself managing stakeholders with wildly different visions of how this new tech should be applied.

We call this technology-driven innovation, and it's entirely backwards. An emerging technology does not a successful venture make (see 3DTV, Juicero or Segway).

Problem-driven innovation

Instead, if we're going to succeed in driving growth by building new businesses, products and services, we have to wean colleagues off this technology-driven innovation mindset towards a problem-driven approach.

The most successful startups, unicorns, VCs and corporates don't invest in technology; they invest in problems, the team trying to solve them, and the solutions they're developing - in that order. Because being a problem-driven innovator:

• Focuses your human and financial resources more efficiently by using problems as a focal point for effort.
• Increases the hit rate of the solutions you're developing by virtue of the fact that they solve a real problem for real people.
• Helps you scale more effectively through a genuinely compelling value proposition.

Here are a few questions you can ask next time someone wants to know what you and your team are doing about quantum/spacial computing/AI:

1. What is the problem we think that this technology could solve?
2. Have we validated that this problem actually exists?
3. If it exists, do people care enough to want to solve it?

I'm not suggesting there's no place for nascent technology; clearly, there is. And for that reason, it's important to deeply understand how they work, their benefits and their limitations in case one day, they're part of a solution to a problem you're working on.

But if we're going to succeed as innovators, we need to think more deeply about how we create, deliver and capture value from solving customer problems rather than new tech.

Perhaps we all need to be more anthropologist and less technologist.

For more advice, recommendations and support to bring you closer to a problem-driven approach to growth, join The Fold, our free membership community for corporate change-makers.