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A solid consensus would seem to exist that customer feedback gathered through market research is a key to successful product innovation.

And yet, I’m surprised how often one can hear dissenting voices. Some people — usually those without hands-on experience in the innovation process — claim that paying too much attention to customers stifles innovation and reduces it to a mere incremental improvement of existing products (which these people consider anathema to the “true” innovation).

In support of their point of view, they love to quote Steve Jobs: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

A plausible interpretation of this quote might be that had Jobs listened to his customers, Apple would still have been making incremental improvements to Apple-1.

Another supportive quote is attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”

I remember reading a brilliant piece by Tristan Kromer, who provided an interesting twist to the Ford quote:

“If the customer asks for a faster horse, do not build a faster horse. Ask, ‘Why do you want a faster horse? What would you use it for?’ If the customer wants a faster horse to move cargo across town, a car might be a great invention. When the customer wants a faster horse to win a horse race, a car is a terrible invention.”

It was then when it hit me. I re-read Ford’s quote. Re-read it again, too: “If I had asked my customers…they would have said.”

Ford didn’t ask his customers! He simply assumed that all they wanted was a faster horse. And yet, he invented a car. Good for him!

It’s still unfortunate that Ford didn’t develop a habit of asking his customers what they wanted. I doubt that many of them would have said they wanted a faster horse. Most of them would have replied, as Kromer suggested, that they needed to move cargo across town.

And if Ford kept asking follow-up questions — which cargo, for which distances, at which speed — useful feedback would have inevitably emerged.

Who knows, had Ford talked to his customers, the first Ford truck — arguably the best Ford Motor Company’s invention ever — would have appeared earlier than 20 years after the first Ford car.

Curiously, in the 1930s, the Toyota Motor Corporation invented the 5 Whys technique, a simple but powerful approach to getting employee and customer feedback. I don’t want to sound obnoxious but had Ford, not Toyota, invented the 5Y, it might have been Ford, not Toyota, being today the second largest car manufacturer in the world.

Of course, one should understand the difference between two related, overlapping, yet distinct forms of customer feedback: customer wants and customer needs.

What focus groups produce is what the customer wants: a demand for a faster horse or a faster computer. It takes more time and effort — and more sophisticated market research tools — to identify customer needs behind customer wants.

True, people often don’t know that they want a product until you show it to them. But it is only after they realize that they need this product that they are ready to pay for it.

There is no innovation without customer feedback — either in the form of wants or needs.

And what about Steve Jobs? Read his quote again, too. Jobs didn’t like focus groups, arguably a messy tool for collecting consumer feedback. But he says nothing about other forms of market research. Did he loathe them all? I don’t know. Do you?

Regardless, a genius like Steve Jobs can afford to eschew proper market research and trust his guts. Feel yourself on par with Jobs? Go ahead and try to develop new products without doing market research first.

Just don’t be surprised if your innovation outcomes will be less impressive than Jobs’s.