One of the best ways to make and keep your company innovative is to have people invent solutions to their own problems or needs. In other words, be your own customer and satisfy yourself. If that is not possible—if you are in a business where you cannot be your own customer—then figure out a way to experience the world as a customer experiences it.

Here are some specific things you might do to stimulate people in your company to be the customer and to replicate the woodwork factor:

• Hire customers. NIKE, for instance, has lots of athletes as employees. We visited NIKE during a product development session, and found Marketing Manager Tom Hartge—an avid runner—working with the design team to create shoes that he used on his own runs. NIKE hires elite athletes as product testing consultants who are expected to test the new products under the most severe circumstances and report back with ideas and problems.

• Allow employees to take time to field test products or services. At L.L.Bean, for example, any Bean executive can get an extra week’s vacation to do product testing, even if that means a fly-fishing trip in Alaska, going to Ontario for the opening of the duck and goose season, or checking out enormous Danner Yukon cold-weather hunting boots in British Columbia.

You have to understand your customer’s needs and all the different ways you can address

them. You have to look at a problem from all angles. You have to get a little creative. And you have to notice the problem in the first place.

That last point doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it’s huge. It’s the difference between a startup employee and its founder.

Most people are so habituated to the problems in their home lives or work that they no longer realize they’re problems. They simply go about their day, get into bed, close their eyes, realize they left the lights on in the kitchen, groan and grump down the stairs, without ever thinking: Why is there no light switch in my bedroom that turns off all the lights in the house?

You can’t solve interesting problems if you don’t notice they’re there.

Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.

Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.