Customer Research and Consumer Delight

Unmet consumer needs are considered the holy grail of product and service innovation: a mystical, sacred entity with unlimited value and powers for those that know how to tap into it. It would seem that with present day digitalization and social media, it is easier to connect to users everywhere through online surveys, platforms, and data mining technology. Moving from a mass-producing economy to one based on individually tailored products suggests that the gap between consumer needs and producer response are closely aligned. Yet the mystique surrounding unmet user needs remains.

This article is part of the THNK VIEWS series. We bridge theory and practice on organizing imagination and innovation by extracting key implications and offering new insights to innovation practitioners. This article builds on Philippe Duverger’s research Variety is the Spice of Innovation: Mediating Factors in the Service Idea Generation Process.

Duverger’s key findings suggest that:

• Consumers seeking variety are most likely to have the most innovative ideas, but will also switch services easily.
• When combined with enough technical knowledge and resources, these users will be able to create the products and services that will satisfy their unmet needs.
• To secure future business prosperity, greater attention should be given to finding new ways to appeal to these users, and find their unmet consumer needs.

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How Innovation Develops Among Individuals in Niche Social Networks

In the current digital arena, social networks have touched the lives of almost every human being on earth, allowing us to share life's novelties with friends and loved ones. However, social networks are not restricted to sharing and commenting on pictures, but giving rise to innovation among individuals to help make our world a better place.

Social networks in the form of crowdfunding sites allow individuals to give wings to their innovative ideas for a new startup. Many online communities have also been set up to find innovative solutions for existing challenges such as: global warming, energy consumption, agriculture, space science, etc.

What kind of social networks are driving innovation?

• Online project management tools from tech ventures such as FindNerd provide an android developer forumwhere tech people ideate and resolve queries as quickly as possible
• Someone with a brilliant, innovative idea for a new mobile or web app can learn app development through social networks

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The Best Tools to Derisk Innovation

    At the start of the twenty first century the innovation buzz has become deafening. It commands the attention of everything - from the popular media to scientific journals. Innovation is claimed to be the driver of economies and the competitive edge of companies. With innovation being the core of many new management styles, one question still remains for the enthusiastic manager; what are the concrete tools for my employees to build our revolutionary innovations?

At the core of any innovation management technique is a risk management philosophy to lower risks along the development and implementation chain. Whether it is focused on minimizing waste via Lean Thinking, correctly addressing consumer needs via Design Led-Thinking or hedging bets via Equity Style Management, the focus is always on how do we reduce the risk inherent in being innovative? Risk and innovation are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other.

“4% of innovation initiatives achieve their internally defined success criteria.”

The tools to achieve these goals nowadays are focused around a few enabling principles. They are mostly about connecting the right people to the right problems. And doing this in the simplest and most frictionless way possible. We are seeing this with Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, Open Innovation (both ingoing and outgoing), Open Access, Open Source, and many more.

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5 Ways to Create a Successful Innovation Program

You’ve heard it a thousand times: companies need to innovate in order to survive. The Googles and the Apples of the world are doing it- Google famously used to require employees to dedicate 20% of their time to innovation. But what exactly does it take to create a sustainable innovation program, especially if you are in an industry that is traditionally risk averse?

As the global workforce is inundated with young, tech-savvy professionals, corporations must embrace the reality that, whether they like it or not, the world has gone social. People are leveraging crowdsourcing for personal forms of communication and entertainment, and crowdsourcing has found a place in the enterprise too.

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A Compelling Value Proposition: The Missing Tool in Your Lean Startup Kit

Eric Reis first introduced the concept of Lean Startup in 2008. Today Lean Startup is deployed far beyond entrepreneurial circles and is taking root in large, complex organizations looking to improve their new product success rates – and in the process build lean cultures. This is very good news. Too often the processes corporations use in pursuit of innovation can actually erode their capability to innovate. Still, when applying the principles of “Build – Measure – Learn” to initiating Lean practices in corporations, there is room for improvement…and possibly even for a pivot.

CVP before MVP

Corporations do not operate with the freedom of a startup, and navigating the internal learning and approval cycles can be even more challenging than effectively engaging customers. Before an intrapreneur starts coding, fabricating, etc. to test his/her new concept as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the market, approvals and sponsorship from management is required. So rather than building an MVP, I recommend that these intrapreneurs start with a CVP (Compelling Value Proposition). Innovators need a way to not only get smart fast about what their target customers want, but also about what management wants and will support. An effective bridge for crossing the internal chasm between a potentially brilliant idea and the approval to build a minimum viable product is essential.

Getting smart fast

1. Start the process by sharing your initial thoughts with a few trusted colleagues.
2. Once you’ve considered the comments of these initial exchanges carefully, and you find the idea still has significant value, widen your circle of support by talking to experts and key stakeholders. Build a mock-up.

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How to Do Business Model Innovation for the Established Firm

This article provides a systematic framework for helping executives of large, established organizations identify opportunities for business model innovation and organize themselves to pursue these opportunities. While also applicable to start-ups, this article focuses primarily on how to define, challenge, and revamp the business model of an existing business or organization.

In nearly every industry tried and tested business models are coming under attack at an unprecedented rate:Pharmaceutical companies are searching for alternatives to the blockbuster model. Banks are looking for innovative ideas to make up for lost fees and revenues due to new regulations. A drop in advertising revenues and circulation pushes newspapers towards new sources of income. Traditional brick and mortar bookstores are losing out to online competitors that are not encumbered by pricey real estate. Software providers are being threatened by cloud computing. The common root cause at the heart of the problem:a once successful business models.

“Changing a business model of an established organization is difficult – the gravitational pull of the existing business is hard to overcome.”

What is a business model, anyway?

A business model describes the logic behind how an organization communicates, creates, and captures value. Henry Chesbrough in his book “Open Innovation” suggests that a business model has six functions:

• Articulate the value proposition – the value created for users by the offering based on the technology.
• Identify a market segment – the users to whom the technology is useful and the purpose for which it will be used.

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How To Become A Business Model Architect

Our first article in this series, titled “Include Business Model Review as a New Year Resolution”, described a method to reveal weaknesses in your business model. So, what do you do next after you complete your business model assessment and find weaknesses in one or more of its cornerstones? You find Value Accelerators (VA)™! VA’s are specific and market-proven ideas, assets or strategies that directly accelerate revenue and profit growth. This article discusses how to develop, assess and prioritize the best VAs to strengthen weaknesses in your business model. It also gives you a link to download an example of a scorecard to help prioritize the VAs.

People, like companies, have problems they cannot solve alone. Frequently, the sufferer feels the pain and recognizes the onset of symptoms, but cannot find practical solutions. The sad part is that there are likely to be proven solutions for their specific condition – the sufferer just does not know how to find them. This describes the struggle a company faces with business model weaknesses. Diagnosing such problems is difficult (symptoms are frequently misread) and a reliable cure is hard to find.

A quick history of our experience with Accelerators (VA)™

From 1989 to 1995, I worked with a team involved in researching how companies in different industries use variations of the same process innovations in new product development, customer acquisition, production, distribution, and other major processes.  In other words, we were hunters – looking for solutions proven by others to improve our own processes

These gems were easy to find – the popular business press covered them, and we visited top companies to speak with executives who were happy to discuss the smart things they had done. Our team developed a series of analytical “lenses” to clarify the value and portability of these gems that helped us curate them. We started building a catalog of valuable, highly adaptable, portable innovations.

Here is not the end….To view the full Article about How To Become A Business Model Architect visit Innovation Management. Also visit our various programs of Online Learning Innovation Programs and also get updated with our latest Articles.