Editor’s note: Keri Christensen is vice president of the communications division of Market Strategies International, a Livonia, Mich., research firm. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title “Three MR ideas to drive customer-centric innovation.”
French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
I recently attended an energizing and thought-provoking conference titled “Capturing Deep Insights to Promote a Consumer-Centric Innovation Process.” I wanted to share a few takeaways that build on thoughts about innovation.
Use new research tools to uncover trends. Market researchers who want a “seat at the table” in their organizations need to think about how to uncover growth opportunities and potentially disruptive market trends. Several speakers talked about how small-scale exploratory projects and fast iterative approaches allowed their team to use new research tools and make mistakes that led to learning – without the onus of an expensive research project. A shout out to Tom Van Aman at Allstate, Nina Mills at Fidelity Investments and Ann Semeraro at Ask.com for sharing case studies that demonstrated how being a risk taker is not diametrically opposed to being a researcher.
Apply a new framework – use a different lens. Look at your industry and your business model using a new construct. Instead of competing within your market to gain a few more share points, create new, uncontested market space by changing the value proposition.
As suggested in Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, one way to do this is to think about the six conventional boundaries of competition and how to break them or change them for your company or product (industry, strategic group, buyer group, scope of offer, functional vs. emotional orientation and time). Researchers need to think about existing industry norms and then find ways to conduct research that asks “what if” and “why not” to uncover opportunities. Michael Wynblatt at Eaton Corporation offered a fascinating look at how his B2B company uncovered that the primary value of a new wireless sensor technology was not the technology itself, but how it would disrupt the existing norm for installing traffic monitoring equipment.
Get your hands dirty – a starting point. Break down the customer experience into discrete steps and then conduct exploratory, observational research to see if there are pain points or workaround behaviors that are signaling that users are just waiting for a market innovation to make their life easier and help them get a job done better.
Clayton Christensen, professor of business administration at Harvard University, said it best: “You can’t outsource your eyes – get into the field to get in touch with your users, potential users and non-users.”
It’s important that researchers question the status quo.Be curious, take risks and remember to apply all of the research tools at your disposal. Not every project needs to be academically rigorous to produce valid learning that can help your organization compete more effectively.