Steve Jobs had some interesting things to say about putting too much into market research…

He thought customers didn’t know what they wanted until he showed them.

He saw the future. And he didn’t need to take a straw poll every time he was innovating.

It’s good to understand your audience; it’s good to know the habits of people and their everyday lives and cultures. But let’s be careful we don’t do so much asking people what they want that we lose sight of what they will want later…

Like the day Steve Jobs unveiled the Macintosh and a reporter asked him how much market research he’d done, he replied:

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?