This story on Nokia’s demise gets at the real issue behind why so many companies fail to innovate. They listen to users. It’s the one mistake Apple didn’t make. Nokia did, as told by its lead designer:

“That is a pain point for me, because by far they didn’t invent the touch screen phone, we had applications, we had internet phones, we had all that functionality . . . but all of our user testing pointed to the fact that no-one wanted touch phones.”

That feedback look then results in lack of urgency.

“We realised at Nokia that touch was increasingly important and were working towards doing it, but when a company is really busy holding on to what it has built, it is difficult to put enough of a push towards something so drastically new and engender urgency in it,” he says.

“Kudos to Apple though, they had absolutely nothing to lose by taking the risk of re-thinking the interface in such as way, as it was their introduction to the market.”