Frans van Houten Quotes

The top principle for disruptive and sustaining innovation is that it has to have a laser focus on customers. Innovation begins with their needs and expectations.

My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that.

I love taking an idea... to a prototype and then to a product that millions of people use.

Product development is emotional for me! It's really important as a brand that we feel that our products are going to be life-changing for everyone who buys them. We won't ever launch something we don't feel strongly about.

No amount of tools can help a bad product. You have to remain genuine in your product development innovation and quality.

How do you discover a need that nobody yet knows about? This is where the product breakthroughs come through.

I just want to build great products.

You can't make anything authentic by asking people what they want because they don't know what they want. That's what they're looking at you for.

Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

Everyone wants an iPhone, but it would be impossible to design an iPhone in China because it's not a product; it's an understanding of human nature.

People don’t know what they want until they see it.

Don’t ask our customers what they want. Ask yourself what they would want if they knew what you know of what is possible for us to do for them. The burden is on us to understand the consumer’s needs sufficiently to answer that question.

Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.

I ended up going to do a matches program at the state for industrial design. And from there, I got hired at IDEO to joint their design team there - and basically, you are starting as an industrial designer to design products - and then kept asking the question, 'What else can design accomplish? What else can design do?'

If you focus on what people care about, you have ideas. And people are looking for solutions.

If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.

We found we were able to create better, customer-centric product features more quickly with a more diverse product team.

We continue to operate in a fast-changing environment driven by so much disruption, and in this context, we see significant opportunity and demand for Accenture's highly relevant and differentiated services.

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.

It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it.

We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn't want to pay us for. One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn't design without us.

Some of the most successful products are born from a personal need to solve a problem rather than a desire to turn a profit.