Using a straightforward approach and copious examples, the author explains how focusing on three key questions can help your team to develop breakthrough product ideas that while customers.
The first question to ask yourself is, "What is the (existing) product really used for?" This question helps you to look beyond superficial functional attributes of the existing product, and to focus on the tasks that the customer needs to perform and on identifying their pain points. This can only be discovered through observation, not market research or focus groups.
Question number two asks, "When I know what task the product is really used for, are there any steps that I can remove from the task?” This step is all about dissecting the task into its component steps, and creatively looking for ways to simplify what the customer needs to accomplish.
Question three asks, "What tasks are the very next tasks that the customer will want to perform after using my product?" This question prompts the innovator to look at the entire ecosystem within which the product is used, contiguous tasks (tasks that follow one another in a process), new business models and opportunities for service innovation.
This is a refreshing book which focuses on the wealth of opportunities for transforming your company's product offerings. It includes numerous examples that illustrate the Hauptly’s points and demonstrate that it really is possible to “wow” your customers - if you only take off your blinders and asked the right questions.

Dennis Hauptly’s Something Really New: Three Simple Steps to Creating Truly Innovative Products.

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Obviously, you can't teach someone to be an innovator unless you know where game-changing ideas come from. In other words, you need a theory of innovation -- like Ben Hogan's theory of the golf swing. This is why, a few years back, I and several colleagues analyzed more than a hundred cases of business innovation. Our goal: to understand why some individuals, at certain points in time, are able to see opportunities that are invisible to everyone else. Here, in a pistachio-sized shell, is what we learned. Successful innovators have ways of seeing the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, usually by accident, a set of perceptual "lenses" that allow them to pierce the fog of "what is" in order to see the promise of "what could be." How? By paying close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed:"
"1. Unchallenged orthodoxies -- the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
2. Underleveraged competencies -- the "invisible" assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms.
3. Underappreciated trends -- the nascent discontinunities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones."
4. Unarticulated needs -- the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address."

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