One of the key skills that innovators need to develop is empathy. Empathy is needed in innovation to understand your customer’s pains and reasons to adopt such or such behavior. At the individual level, empathy is triggered by what scientists call the “mirror effect”: when exposed with someone else’s situation, it triggers the same part of your brain as if you were actually living the scene. But how do you create empathy at the organisation level ? The trick is simple: if you want to innovate, do your clients’ job !

Parrot is well know for its best-selling AirDrone, but it is primarily the world leader in OEM hands-free modules for car dashboards. Its products are so good that they are almost ubiquitous: best sound quality, great design, easy to use… but is that all it should be ? Well, to figure this out, Parrot management actually asked its R&D to develop car dashboards. Does it actually SELL dashboards ? No, as it would be competing with its customers (the car manufacturers). But developing car dashboards is a way to go through all the process its customers are going through, and understand the place of its OEM bluetooth modules in the process. So its OEM modules are also the easiest to integrate, because Parrot understood what its customers are going through.

Now, a lot a people believe that Apple is about to sell a car. Obviously, there is evidence that Apple is BUILDING a car. Does it mean that it will SELL cars? I doubt about it. As Apple bacame a platform company, all it probably wants is to understand how car manufacturers will integrate its platform in the most-elegant possible way. Corporate empathy at its best.