Cultivating customer obsession: a new innovation culture

Effective customer-centric innovation begins with a dual focus: understanding both broad market trends and the specific challenges customers face. While mega trends can offer insight into the direction industries are heading, it’s the real needs of end users that often reveal the most impactful opportunities. By continually aligning development priorities with customer requirements, companies can ensure their solutions remain relevant and grounded in practical value.

At Bekaert, we use various methodologies that support this approach, encouraging iterative development and continuous feedback from customers that engage with the innovative solution. The discipline of innovation includes maintaining an ongoing cycle of ideation, testing, and refinement based on direct customer insights. This helps ensure that products are not only relevant at launch but also adaptable as needs evolve.

A key element of customer-centric innovation is building diverse, cross-functional teams. When teams include members with varied expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives, they bring fresh thinking to the table. At Bekaert, next to technical and market experts in the field to innovate, we bring individuals who are highly skilled but are not necessarily subject matter experts—into those cross-functional teams. They can contribute with very valuable insights and expertise from their own backgrounds. Free from the constraints of direct expertise, these team members often offer unorthodox ideas, leading to unexpected and innovative solutions. When ideas are approached and challenged in a cross-functional way, the ones that are chosen for further development will have a much higher chance of success.  

To make these teams effective, a careful balance of personalities and skill sets is essential. Combining technical with functional experts, such as business developers or experts in commerce, finance, sustainability, safety, marketing, etc. helps us create a collaborative environment that thrives from diverse perspectives. The resulting cross-pollination of ideas promotes a holistic approach to innovation that is responsive to a range of customer needs.

In recent years, B2B companies have increasingly recognized the importance of customer centricity, mirroring a shift that began in the B2C space. In B2B, attention is not only paid to the final users of the product but also to the engineers and technicians who deploy the solutions. By incorporating a customer-centric mindset at every level, we can design solutions that are easier to integrate and better suited to the end solution’s requirements.

This customer-first approach allows us to address the needs of all stakeholders involved, from design and engineering to final implementation. The result is a more cohesive, relevant, and sustainable product development process that reflects a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s needs and challenges.

Collecting customer insights is a discipline. Interviewing customers who want to work with you to improve their business requires certain skills. At Bekaert, we achieve this by drawing on a mix of methods: large-scale surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and customer advisory boards. By using these diverse approaches, our teams gain a full picture of the customer’s needs, allowing for more informed decisions and ensuring that each iteration of the product aligns with market expectations.

However, collecting these initial insights is only the first step in a customer-centric approach. Their real value lies in how they are applied throughout the development process. By integrating customer feedback into every stage of the development cycle we create a continuous improvement loop, where insights from one iteration feed into the next. This iterative process enables us to develop solutions that not only address current customer needs but are adaptable to future demands.

Customer-centric innovation is about more than creating better products; it’s about fostering a culture that values collaboration, adaptability, and real-world relevance. By embedding customer insights into every stage of the development process, we build long-term relationships with our customers and create solutions that stand the test of time.

Through this approach, we lay the foundation for sustainable growth, making a lasting impact on our industries by delivering innovation that truly aligns with our markets’ needs. Whether starting from a single project or driving a company-wide transformation, a customer-focused mindset ensures that innovation remains as meaningful as it is impactful, guided not just by what’s possible but by what’s truly needed.