Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers

Hidden in Plain Sight by global innovation consultant Jan Chipchase with Simon Steinhardt is a fascinating look at how consumers think and behave.

Chipchase, named by Fortune as “one of the 50 smartest people in tech,” has traveled the world, studying people of all nations and their habits, paying attention to the ordinary things that we do every day an how they effect our buying decisions. 

Future-focused and provocative, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers illuminates exactly what drives consumers to make the choices they do, and demonstrates how all types of businesses can learn to see—and capitalize upon—what is hidden in plain sight today to create businesses tomorrow.

This essential guide for innovators, entrepreneurs, and designers reveals the framework for seeing the world differently:

• Design Research in the Wild: Go beyond traditional marketing research by learning the field techniques used to understand customers in their natural environments, from the streets of Shanghai to the villages of Uganda.
• Actionable Consumer Insights: Discover the hidden motivations that drive everyday choices and learn to decode the "why" behind what people buy, carry, and value.
• A Framework for Innovation: Apply powerful conceptual tools like "threshold mapping" and "range of distribution" to spot untapped business opportunities and inform better product design.
• Calibrating Your Cultural Compass: Learn how to understand the subtle but critical cultural differences that shape global markets and determine a product’s success or failure.

A global-innovation expert offers a new perspective on how consumers think and how to develop products and services that affect their everyday lives.

Who are your next customers—not just the ones you are serving today but the ones you'll need three, five, or ten years from now? How do you figure out what goods and services will attract them in the future before your competitors do?

According to Jan Chipchase—whom Fast Company has called the "James Bond of design research" and Fortune has called the "Indiana Jones of technology for the developing world"—most of the clues are right in front of us. The key is learning to see the ordinary in a revolutionary new way. As the executive creative director of Global Insights at frog, an award-winning global design and innovation company, Chipchase draws on everyday objects and patterns to show us how to see the world differently, from making a phone call to filling up a gas tank to ascertaining whether it's actually half-and-half you're pouring into your coffee. Chipchase is always looking for opportunities—gaps, anomalies, and contradictions—that will give his clients, some of the world's largest and most successful companies, a distinct competitive advantage, whether they're delivering the most low-tech bar of soap or the most high-tech wireless network.

In Hidden in Plain Sight, Chipchase takes readers on his journeys around the globe and shares his methods for identifying the unmet needs of customers. No matter where he stops—whether Cleveland or Kabul—his goals are the same: to spot and decode the routines of daily life and to help readers use the very same tools that he and his team use to see, and capitalize upon, what is hidden in plain sight today to create businesses tomorrow.

“Jan Chipchase is a zen master of watching, listening and uncovering the truths of human behavior. I would encourage you to apply the wisdom found within Hidden in Plain Sight whether you are in search of insights that might lead to the next ground breaking innovation or simply looking to gain a richer understanding of the world around you.” - Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, author of Change by Design

“…a lively, thought-provoking, and often humorous read.” - Publishers Weekly

“This category-defying book reads like a great novel, but it’s fact, not fiction. Both a guide to the cultures of the world and a primer on design research, it’s fun to read but also deeply insightful. To create great, successful products you have to understand prospective customers-which means living like they do, eating their food, commuting with them, and getting shaved by them (even if you are a woman). So how to define this book? Is it a travel guide, a textbook, or a treasure trove of ideas for products, marketing, and living? The answer is yes: all of the above.” - Don Norman, Nielsen Norman group, author of Living with Complexity and Design of Everyday Things

“The focus of innovation is making a remarkable shift away from how we create technology and towards the new experiences we must create. Jan’s approach to ethnographic research is pioneering just the kind of insights that will drive these new experiences, creating the innovations of tomorrow. Hidden in Plain Sight takes you inside the process by which he gains these insights.” - Rob Soderbery, Senior Vice President, Cisco Systems