Years ago, I was director of web strategy and interactive media at a mid-size public university in the South. My job was broad: if it had a pixel, it fell in my lane. So when a colleague in the parking office came back from a conference fired up about wayfinding kiosks (those large, expensive, interactive terminals placed across campus to help people navigate) the project landed on my desk.
Nobody had asked for them. We were well into the era of smartphones, with maps already in everyone’s pocket. But someone had seen a shiny object, gotten excited and the momentum took over. Before the project hit my desk, they had already made a nearly six-figure purchase. We spent hundreds of hours across multiple teams planning, installing, and implementing them.
And then almost no one used them.
Usage was usually in the single digits each week. Sometimes that single digit was one.
The technology itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we had never stopped to ask whether we were solving a real problem for real people. Had anyone sat down with students, visitors or families and asked what made navigating campus difficult, we likely would have learned that kiosks were not the answer.
We skipped empathy and went straight to implementation. The result was wasted time, wasted money and wasted energy that could have gone toward something people actually needed.
That story is not unusual. Versions of it play out on campuses all the time. A conference demo creates excitement. A vendor pitch sparks possibility. A leader gets intrigued by a capability before anyone has asked whether there is a real need behind it.
That is why empathy is essential to innovation.
People often treat empathy as a soft skill. Worse, they conflate it with being nice. But
I see empathy as the discipline of understanding the lived experience of the people you are trying to serve before you design, build, buy, or launch something on their behalf.
The real opportunity for innovation often lives in the gap between how we think our processes work and how people actually experience them. But you can only see that gap if you are willing to pay attention.
Empathy-driven listening surfaces the things that rarely show up in formal reports: the spreadsheet someone built because the official system is unusable, the question that gets asked repeatedly because instructions are unclear, the workaround that has been quietly keeping a broken process alive for three years.
Follow those trails of broken dreams, and they often lead to the highest-value opportunities for change.
If students are not reading an email, the problem may not be that the subject line is weak. It may be that they are overwhelmed by too many messages, unsure which office to trust, or confused about the action they are supposed to take. If visitors are getting lost on campus, the problem may not be a lack of signage. It may be that the parking instructions were unclear before they ever arrived.
Empathy slows the rush to solution just enough to ask better questions.
What are people trying to do? Where are they getting stuck? What are they feeling in that moment? What information do they already have? What are they missing? What workaround have they created because the official process does not work for them? When you start there, the solution may look very different from what you expected.
That is the power of empathy in innovation: it expands the range of possible solutions because it gives you a more accurate understanding of the problem. It keeps you from over-engineering answers to the wrong questions. And it helps ensure that what you create is not just new, but useful.
Empathy is the compass that keeps that process oriented toward actual human need.
I still think about those kiosks. They aren’t the biggest mistake I’ve ever seen, but they were such a clear mistake. We made assumptions and engineered a solution no one needed. Empathy would not have made the project slower. It would have made it smarter.
And that is what innovation needs most. The next kiosk pitch that lands on your desk won’t announce itself as a mistake. It’ll come with a vendor deck, a budget line, and someone’s genuine excitement. Empathy is the only thing that slows you down long enough to ask the one question that matters: does anyone actually want this?
