Sarina Ball

Innovation Catalysts: Intuit and Disruptive Innovation

Coles’s College of Business: Kennesaw State University

MGT 4199: Technology Management

Dr. Teters

February 18, 2023

 Firstly to sum, Intuit is a software development company headquartered in Mountain

View California which is highly acclaimed for its financial management solutions for private and

small businesses use. The company is highly renowned for having launched the development of

TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint and MailChimp; four highly successful products which effectively

upturned the financial software market in 2008. Altogether, these products upon release quickly

surpassed other personal finance products from formidable opponents such as Microsoft in both

sales and revenue numbers resulting in Intuit gaining significant market share in the technology

industry.

Intuit is the only one of eight other software companies founded in the early 1980's to

survive to the present day. In its lifetime the firm has faced numerous disruptions in technology

within the past three decades, as the advent of the internet, the creation of windows, the

explosion of smartphones and the emergence of cloud computing have prompted the company

to continuously look for new ways to adapt. Above all, the key to Intuit’s survival has been

innovation in the company’s business model. In this case, one of the initial founders of Intuit,

Scott Cook had a fervent design-oriented conviction that led him to consistently put creativity

into the forefront of every project selected for development. Likewise another factor that also

influenced Intuit’s survival in the sector was its unabated evaluation of emerging trends for

possible relevance to its customers.

With this in mind, Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, states the

biggest opposition an incumbent firm faces is to decide whether or not to prioritize new

technologies that surface initially as unprofitable or lower quality that have the potential to

disrupt the industry. For instance, the advent of 3D printing technology, also referred to as

“additive manufacturing,” has the potential to critically alter the way products are built for

industries ranging from aerospace to healthcare. While 3D printing began as a niche technology
a report from A.T. Keany consulting firm projects that three dimensional printing will triple its

market value in the upcoming years, increasing from $8.8 billion in 2018 to more than $26 billion

by 2024. For this reason, firms in the affected industries must take into account the impact of

additive manufacturing on the livelihood of their future operations. Moreover, The hundred year

old automotive manufacturer Ford and its current CEO Mark Fields in Dearborn, Michigan is

also faced with an innovator's dilemma as the firm must decide if disruptive technology such as

fully autonomous or electric vehicles are worth fully pursuing or incorporating into the newer

models of the company.

Of course what makes Intuit’s business model distinctive is that it has found a way to

break this archetype and fully embrace the innovator's dilemma. By and large due to the

company’s unique business model Intuit has been successful in organically anticipating

disruptions in the industry for the past forty years. This accomplishment was instigated by the

novel Design for Delight or D4D initiative along with its initial conceiver: Scott Cook's intrepid

efforts. In order to institute this change Cook employed a young director at silicon valley Karen

Hanson to hire “innovation catalysts” or design-thinking coaches with outgoing personalities

interested in helping people solve composition related problems. Although the implementation of

the model was highly involved and took more than three years to complete, the employees at

Intuit were compensated greatly for their laborious efforts as the new D4D business model

resulted in a record fabrication of thirty two new market ideas in a span of one year at Intuit.

Having considered the following, the Design for Delight process is a series of three

consecutive fundamental steps still utilized by the firm in 2022 even though the denominations

of each proceeding have changed. For example the first step in the D4D procedure, or the

"painstorm" is now designated “deep customer empathy.” Even though the measures taken in

this step have not changed, employees still aim to figure out customers’ greatest pain point for
which they could provide relief. The new name is customer-oriented in connotation and it was

precipitated by the company who wanted to purport that it fosters a shared understanding of

insights and motivation to improve the lives of its customers. That is to say the employees “gain

empathy” by observing or shadowing people where and when they are experiencing difficulty.

The second step in the D4D process was referred to as the “sol-jam,” in this step

employees would conceptualize ideas for as many product or service solutions as possible to

address the pain points identified in the previous step. After the "sol-jam" the team would then

retrench the concepts down to a short list for prototyping and testing. Intuit has renamed this

step “go broad to go narrow.'' They first “go broad” by using creativity to explore a variety of

potential solutions and thereafter they “go narrow” by focusing entirely on solutions most likely

to please their customer. In like manner the new name was more suitable and relevant to the

process of brainstorming and elimination.

Lastly, the third and final step in the process was the subsequent "code-jam" where the

company published a preliminary software that wasn't indefectible but was good enough to take

to customers within two weeks. This step was later renamed to “rapid experiments with

customers'' since potential solutions were brought to market much quicker than average

industry standard time. Namely, the first customers to use the software would usually provide

feedback within four weeks of the release date. This feedback allowed the team to incrementally

iterate and release new versions of the software while at the same time saving the company

valuable time and resources for assembling the next project.

 In the final analysis while the D4D transformation of the company Intuit was completed in

2009 their strive for innovation is far from satiated. The industry in which the company competes

in is very volatile and new breakthroughs in technology continue to threaten the company's

current position. In the future Intuit plans to respond to the competition by interlacing their

current financial offerings with humanizing technologies or ambient computing. To clarify,

ambient computing or ubiquitous computing, is the process of blending computing power into

the everyday lives of users in a way that it is lodged invisibly into their surroundings. This means

that the traditional two-dimensional interface of a computer, iPhone, or iPad is going to

fundamentally change. In any event, instead of having to interact directly with a multitude of

different devices to get the expected results, ambient computing allows all of your devices to

work together in tandem to fulfill your needs. This interconnectivity also forms the basis of IoT or

the internet of things, ambient computing takes this one step further by learning the preferences

of the users and adjusting to them correspondingly. At Intuit employees say that the experience

will become extremely immersive and the company has also been working on augmenting

ambient computing functionality with AR, VR, and MR for the past two years. The concept of

mixed reality will help a consumer or small business owner use their software to display

financial information in a three-dimensional format in a more interactive way.

Intuit also now has their sights set on a more far-reaching goal beyond simply

technology innovation as the organization aspires to empower the next generation of design-

thinking catalysts outside the actual firm itself. In order to achieve this aspiration the company

provides a free online Design for Delight foundations course designed for both students and

educators alike to learn the fundamentals of the D4D process. The course is set up for users to

work at their own pace and learn the basics of spurring creativity and critical thinking. To

emphasize while many firms would choose not disclose such information for fear of losing a
valuable competitive competence Intuit believes that spreading this knowledge is important for

spreading

References:

DESIGN for DELIGHT – Intuit Labs. www.intuitlabs.com/design-for-delight.

https://intuit.novoed.com/#!/courses/d4d_ongoing_course_students/flyer

team, Intuit Blog. “Tech Talk: Building a Culture of Innovation at Intuit.” Intuit Blog, 7 Feb. 2019,
www.intuit.com/blog/life-at-intuit/tech-talk-building-a-culture-of-innovation-at-intuit/.

Hayes (2019), “Intuit: Embracing the “Innovator’s Dilemma.”” Digital Innovation and
Transformation, d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/intuit-embracing-the-innovators-
dilemma/

Ikujirō Nonaka, and Hirotaka Takeuchi. The Wise Company : How Companies Create
Continuous Innovation. New York, Ny, Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Operations and Performance Consulting.” Kearney, www.kearney.com/service/operations-

performance. Accessed 21 Oct. 2023.

“3D Printing Market Value 2017.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/261693/3d-printing-

market-value-forecast/.

Shin, Jaeho, et al. “Product and Service Innovation: Comparison between Performance and
Efficiency.” Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, vol. 7, no. 3, July 2022, p. 100191,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2022.100191.

“‌ International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence.” International Journal of Ambient

Computing and Intelligence, 9 Oct. 2023, https://doi.org/10.4018/ijaci. Accessed 21 Oct. 2023.