In order to build a watch, you need watch makers and users inside the company. Understanding the value involves a separate creative process in most cases.

It’s really dumb to take generalizations too far here but I’ll move this one a bit forward.

There are really two kinds of innovation. One involves incremental improvement (the addition of air conditioning or radios to automobiles). The other is more transformative. The internet, automobiles in general, the telephone, airplanes, microwave cooking, television, radio, plastic, computing, software, indoor plumbing, antibiotics and so on.

In incremental improvement, it’s easier to see the value. In transformative improvement it’s harder.

But, let’s take the case of video interviewing as an incremental improvement. If you look around the industry, you’ll see lots of companies claiming that video interviewing is the next thing. Why? because you can time and location shift interviews. In other words, they are very busy selling the functionality. You could restate the value propositions of all of the competitors as “Video interviewing is valuable because it’s video
interviewing.”

That’s sufficient to sway the early adopters and useless for the other 85%
of the market. And, it’s unlikely that the people who understand the real
value first will be recruiters. (Because the current positioning doesn’t
save them time, it just gives schedule flexibility)

In the long run, there will be a breakthrough in describing the value of
video interviewing. I’m thinking hard about it but don’t see the answer
yet. You can be sure that the value won’t have anything to do with video.