2. Targets

This box is for your hypotheses about all the people your innovation will serve. As we discussed in chapter 3, the map of “customers” for social change is considerably more diverse than the traditional business definition of customer, but you can start with the generic categories discussed in chapter 3—direct targets, indirect targets, funders, or the more detailed set of archetypes laid out in Table 3.1.

Get specific here with a strong bias toward early adopters no matter what type of target you’re talking about. Most true innovation is not going to appeal to the mainstream market right away, so for purposes of testing and validating your hypotheses, think specifically about those most likely to initially adopt or be influenced by what you’re going to send out into the world.

In addition to the target type, consider listing targets by the roles they’re expected to play in the innovation. For Smarter, Cleaner, Stronger, newspaper editors were a major target for the research on the economic benefits of acting on climate change. The senators were indirect targets compared to the editors we tried to reach directly. The editors’ role was to be influencers, people who shape the senators’ daily political environment.

It’s possible to really go to town in this box, and you should determine the level of detail you want to go into initially versus additions you can make further down the road. Some of the dimensions to consider as you hone in on your targets include:

• Their relationship to the problem. Are they aware of it (urgency)? Are they motivated to change it (active versus passive)? Are they already working on it?

• Stories. You can write up detailed stories of how key users will encounter your innovation as a way of generating additional hypotheses about how to move forward. For the National Museum example, the planners had to assess how researchers would be affected by the new museum, its location, and how it stored the overall collection.

• Archetypes. What are key characteristics of your targets that you should consider in designing your innovation? For the National Museum, how do researchers differ from simple museum patrons or corporate sponsors?

Your targets also don’t operate in a vacuum, and your innovation should be designed with a sense of how they make decisions and whom they interact with along the way. Consider mapping the way they work and/or their key influencers. There are many tools for doing this, but an important one for the social sector is power mapping (see Moveon.org’s great resource for this at leanchange.net/powermap). The power map includes actors who may not even be targets for your innovation, like those opposed to your campaign or service, but the exercise will help you think through the elements of your innovation that must account for opposition, and this will be invaluable in the next phase of customer discovery—validation.

Table 4.2 shows sample entries for the Targets box for each of our case studies.