How Do I Address the Customer’s Needs When I Don’t Know Who the Customer Is?

Nannette Stangle-Castor

As I mentioned in my post about the innovation training I did at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this week, the training discussed some of Fuentek's specific approaches to collaborative R&D and technology transfer—approaches that might be new for some R&D organizations.

Some of these approaches we’ve written about before. For example, check out Laura Schoppe’s Sources for Space Technologies paper, which provides the 6-S model for effectively picking the recipe for innovation and the best partners, which also contributes to future technology commercialization.

Then there’s Understand-Address-Present (UAP), which is a model for overcoming one of the biggest barriers to open innovation: communication with the internal personnel who will ultimately use the technology emerging from the collaborative R&D. I refer to those personnel genuinely (though perhaps unorthodoxly) as customers.

The UAP concept sparked a lot of interest among the NASA innovators and managers at Monday’s training. I explained that thinking of the technology users as customers increases the likelihood that the collaboratively developed technology is more likely to be infused into a NASA mission program.

Some of the attendees pointed out that often the “customer” is not well-defined or the requirements often are in a variable level of definition, making it hard to understand the customer’s needs.

This situation does indeed present a bit of a challenge. Technology development takes time, and waiting is not always an option. If work is not started on a new technology right away (prior to detailed requirements being derived and before the customer has truly been defined), then the chance of this new technology being ready in time for consideration for inclusion into a mission program is unlikely. So collaborative R&D and open innovation and the UAP model don’t really apply, right? Wrong!

When trying to apply industry-developed best practices to government, you have to keep some nuances in mind. And although it’s an expression I’ve never much cared for, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Sure, for many research projects, the ultimate goal is not always well-defined, and the development timelines are often very challenging. In those cases apply the parts of the UAP model that you can when you can. But keep your eye out for the emergence of the customer and more defined requirements. That way, you are ready to move forward when the opportunity presents itself.

For those of you in situations similar to what the NASA innovators described, what are your ideas for monitoring for an emerging customer?

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.