Innovation Factors

Maintaining alignment within an organization when it comes to product creation is paramount to long-term stakeholder engagement, user loyalty, and getting to market. What this usually boils down to is a balance between the pull of user insights and push of internal motives and mission, or lack there of.

Here are a few key factors to product innovation success.

Get everyone on board from the beginning (and take them along with you)

You don’t have to demand upper management be there at every pow-wow, but implementing a strategy early on for touch-points and dates to happen concurrently with your innovation strategy is a must.

Management wants to be involved in the innovation process and oftentimes feels in the dark when they aren’t engaged. By integrating them along the way you are able to better understand their fears, their goals for the product, and many times get specific insight from them that helps the design and development along.

Design a Plan for Insight (PFI)

The process for insight collection can take on many forms. It is very important to lay out a strategy for this. In-home immersions, expert interviews, on-site surveys, product research, and focus groups are just a few.

One thing to note is that the insight research can not only take on any combination of forms from above, but also is driven by the specifics of the product category.

Don’t’ be afraid to rope engineering, marketing, sales, or any other department heads in to these insight outings and discussions. There is an immense amount of information and insights to be gained on all fronts that will ultimately assist in the continued success of development, ad campaigns, and product launches.

Building Character (User Groups)

If you organization does not have a deep understanding of who their target market is and how their users breakdown, you might be in trouble. Or, at the very least, need to hire an industrial designer, or product innovation firm.

Fielding surveys along with the above mentioned insight activities and research days are the way to do this. Deep understanding of user lifestyles, purchasing behaviors and intent go a long way to identifying unique key factors that drive product success.

We differentiate these groups by giving them names like, Selective Grassrooter, Occasional Tasters, Flavor Adventurer, Weekend Warriors, Fashion Instigators, and on. They are meant to sum up in one title the underlying defining characteristics of that group to better align concept development.

Concept Development

There has been a lot written on the process of idea-generation and as an industrial designer I could wax poetically for days on the subject. For that reason I won’t belabor the topic too much.

The collection of insights from your user research is directly applied to concept generation.

You will want to group your users and their respective insights. This will allow you a better jumping off point for targeted product creation.

The takeaway for conceptual development is usually that user type (A) has different purchase intent (lens) than user type (B) and therefore would not buy the same product, even though it was solving the same ultimate function. In other words, marketing verbiage, graphics, packaging, look and feel of the product must be different for each user type.

Converge

There is always a delicate balance of parameters when it comes to the intersection of ideas, business, and implementation.

Research on the front end of users, product features, functions and key elements that will define your innovation pipeline are all great points of value.

The cornerstone to proper product design convergence is the user!

They will tell you immediately whether you’ve got a winner or a loser. They’ll tell you when they’d use it, why it’d be better if it were smaller, too rough, too heavy, not enough grip, don’t like the colors…and on, and on.

Data Data Data

The product design process isn’t all shiny lines, and curvaceous forms.

Obtaining data in this day and age is a fairly ubiquitous practice now and should be taken seriously in the product selection process. In the industry, this is called quantitative research, or quant studies.

Just because upper management thinks it’s a great idea, doesn’t mean the user will: Products tank because of this all…the…time!

Defining the percentage of people willing to actually buy your idea is another cornerstone to product success.

Purchase intent is a huge datapoint in concept development that can go a long way in generating buzz and backing for product testing and launches. A great (and fairly cheap) way to do this is to send out surveys, run a few days of mediated focus groups, or work up a little programming with AdWords to cull information from your users.

Having real numbers, data points, and insights from your user groups is the largest factor driving initial sales. Having the key players in your organization on board each step of the way is also huge.

Don’t expect to alway hit a home run, but if you stick to these few key innovation factors when your organization wants to innovate you’ll be light-years ahead of the competition.