While that's obviously important, there are other matters which need to be resolved and despite meetings with the UCD, little or no progress has been made.
If you look at the companies that try to follow the processes described in the article verses the companies that follow a UCD or VI process, the success rates favor the UCD and VI style approaches.
The basic difference is that most folks see innovation as a brainstorming approach whereby you generate solutions then find problems for them to solve verses the more successful UCD style approaches that focus on redefining the problem, first.