People-led service requirements

Today I attended an event at Essex University.  One of the presentations was by an employee of Kodak about the process of moving from a people need through research to service development.  It was really well done, and concentrated on the way they had observed and analysed what people like to do with photos, in order to understand what service to offer through software support for managing digital images.  I wish so many other service offerings would begin from this approach.  

I often evangelise about the innovation of Apple in this blog - and I think they really do have some great examples, not just with product but also process and business models.  One of the reasons some of their innovations in the products and services they offer to customers are so good is because they also start from the perspective of what people like and want to do and accomplish.  This then drives how they use technology to simplify and break down barriers so that users can get done what they want, in ways that suit them ... without engineering hundreds of features that they don't need.   It was really nice to hear a similar approach from Kodak.