From the latest McKinsey quarterly (subscription only sorry) comes a great quote during an interview with Intuit’s Bill Campbell. He’s an innovation evangelist, and this quote sums up why :

We hired some product managers with bank experience. One day, one of them comes to a meeting that included me and banking engineers and says “I want these features.” And I replied, “If you ever tell an engineer what features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You’re going to tell the engineers what problem the consumer has. And then the engineers are going to provide you with a way better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them to put some dopey features in there.

He must be a fan of Anthony Ulwick…

Out of interest, he also talks about supporting the lunatic fringe in an organisation by keeping research and development budgets high. In using this phrase he makes the same reference as Gene Frantz at TI about the lunatic fringe