Why Small Innovations Matter
I have a weakness. The moment I spot a gingerbread house kit in the grocery store's seasonal aisle, it inevitably finds its way into my shopping cart.
My 9 year old son's face lights up when he sees me bringing it home, building gingerbread houses has become a really fun holiday tradition for us. What excites him most isn't the finished product but the creative freedom of decorating, of making the house uniquely his own. He's never been one to follow the picture on the box, preferring instead to let his imagination guide where each candy and frosting flourish should go.
But year after year, before we could reach that joyful decorating stage, we'd face the same frustrating challenge. The house itself, those seemingly simple walls and roof pieces of gingerbread, would become an exercise in patience and perseverance. The icing, serving as both glue and mortar, never seemed to dry fast enough. Walls would tilt and collapse, the roof would slide off just as we thought we had it secured. Hours would pass in this structural battle, my son's excitement gradually giving way to frustration as he waited to begin the part he loved most.
This year, however, something changed. Opening our Disney-themed Mickey and Minnie Mouse gingerbread house kit, we discovered something new this year, small plastic support clips. These simple devices were designed to hold the walls together while the icing dried, with additional pieces that extended over the walls to support the roof. What followed was nothing short of transformative. The walls stayed perfectly aligned as we applied the icing. The roof settled exactly where it should, no sliding, no collapsing. Within minutes, not hours, my son was doing what he loved best, decorating the house with his own creative vision.
As I watched him happily placing candies and piping frosting onto his now-stable creation, I found myself wanting to thank whoever had designed these small plastic pieces. Some product designer, somewhere, had truly understood this pain point and solved it with such elegant simplicity.
It was hard for me to not think about work as he was enjoying adding little red lights to the eaves of the house.
We had a recent client interaction that perfectly illustrated the opposite of this gingerbread house innovation. We had discovered that their shopping cart was showing generic shipping estimates of 8-10 weeks, which was causing significant cart abandonment. Our suggestion was simple, revise the messaging to be more precise and informative, as the data suggests that customers feel it is important to have precise shipping times for the products they are ordering but you are giving them generic shipping estimates based on the worst case scenarios.
The response? "Can we stop talking about shipping times? It doesn't matter how we position or message shipping times in the cart. What we need are real insights that we can use to create better shopping experiences for our customers and telling us we need to address how we message shipping times isn’t it!"
This dismissive response represents a common mindset in business, the belief that meaningful innovation must be groundbreaking, industry-shaking, revolutionary. But the gingerbread house kit tells a different story. Those small plastic clips didn't reinvent the concept of gingerbread houses. They didn't add new features or change the fundamental experience. Instead, they simply removed a point of friction that had been frustrating customers for years.
Too often, when analysts and researchers present insights about these small friction points, the equivalent of suggesting plastic support clamps for a wobbly gingerbread wall, they're dismissed as too pedestrian, too basic. Leadership wants to hear about game changing innovations, transformative solutions, slap some AI on it, give us the next big thing. But while we're chasing these grand visions, we're overlooking the small improvements that could immediately enhance our customers' experiences.
Sometimes the most impactful innovations aren't revolutionary, they're evolutionary. They're the small tweaks that remove frustration, smooth out rough edges, and make good experiences great. These improvements might not make headlines or impress executives in boardroom presentations or make for great LinkedIn clickbait, but they create the kind of positive customer experiences that build loyalty and drive growth.
As I watched my son put the finishing touches on his gingerbread house, hours earlier than we'd managed in previous years, I couldn't help but think, how many businesses are overlooking their own opportunity to add "support clips" to their customer experience? How many simple solutions are being dismissed because they don't seem impressive enough?
