My friend Dave is a great guy, but terrible to go to restaurants with. Invariably, he ends up peppering the server with endless questions, trying to order things not on the menu, and complaining about the food once it’s served.

People like Dave may be hard to dine with, but they can be great for innovation. That’s because they’re continually dissatisfied with what’s available, looking instead for an ideal experience. The best innovators utilize several techniques to understand consumer dissatisfaction – and then use that understanding to drive innovative ideas.

Listen to problems, not solutions

Recently, many have cited Henry Ford (who famously quipped, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”) and Steve Jobs (“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them”) to make the case that listening to customer feedback is pointless. But as Ted Levitt, Tony Ulwick, and others have argued, while customers are notoriously bad at coming up with solutions to their own problems, their actual difficulties and complaints – the problems themselves – are a goldmine for observant researchers. That’s why management gurus like Clay Christensen and Gary Hamel have advocated listening not only to your core (and presumably satisfied) customers, but to those on the fringe – the unhappy non-users and complainers. And the louder they whine, the better.

Map out dissatisfaction

To better understand consumer dissatisfaction, author and consultant Adrian Slywotzky has advocated creating a “hassle map” – laying out the entire customer experience with a product or service to pinpoint where customers become frustrated by wasted time and effort. Far too many companies focus solely on adding exciting features to the product itself; great innovators instead often aim to eliminate irritating aspects of the experience. For example, Apple’s most successful products have often reduced hassle in the customer experience as much as they’ve added new capabilities. Through Visual Voicemail, the iPhone improved the bothersome process of navigating phone messages. The iPad greatly reduced both lengthy computer start-up time and the painful need to frequently recharge (through its hugely extended battery life). Most recently, the iCloud service aims to eliminate the irritating need to sync Apple devices using cords. Contrast these improvements with those of other PC-makers in recent years, who focused on adding security features, hundreds of gigs of storage, cameras, etc.

Imagine the ideal

P&G’s consumer researchers have been known to put on “futurist exhibits” to help spur innovative product concepts. After extensive consumer observation and discussion, researchers mock up nonworking but clever products in answer to the question: “How might consumers solve this problem in 50 years?” For example, rather than using an imperfect product that P&G offers today, perhaps the consumer of the future will simply swallow a pill annually to prevent hair from going gray, press a button to have house walls suck away dirt, or drink a tasty beverage to automatically clean his or her teeth. While these Jetson-like inventions may seem far-fetched, the brilliance of the “in the future” conceit is that it allows P&G innovators to forget today’s technical limitations and instead imagine what a perfectly simple and effective solution could look like. Who doesn’t like to imagine a frustration-free future?

Through these and other methods, companies can use consumer dissatisfaction to drive better innovation. A twist on the old maxim is appropriate: Don’t let today’s ‘good enough’ be the enemy of ‘better yet…’ And if you learn to love customer dissatisfaction, you may even be able to put up with a whiner like Dave.