How to discover more provocative innovation insights
Insight is the basis of a successful innovation program
Without provocative insights, your ideas will fall short. How so?
Studies by Kantar and Nielsen show that successful innovators deliver relevant, meaningful and distinctive consumer experiences.
The cost of getting it wrong is high, given the time, resources, and heavy lifting required to develop and launch a new product or service.
A poorly thought-through idea will fail fast if it doesn't tick the relevant, meaningful and distinctive boxes.
So, insight hunting must be the foundation of your project. It's an integral part of the fuzzy front-end innovation efforts and a critical success factor.
We work with teams to define those unmet needs and answer, 'What must we do to be relevant, meaningful and distinctive?
To do this, we consider three types of innovation insights:
Consumer: Empathy for your consumer/target users' needs, frustrations and motivations.
Context: Understand the context in which someone will use your product/service
Technology: How your unique technologies and capabilities can solve that need to be distinctive
Let's take each one in turn with these top tips.
Consumer/user insights
Define your target audience.
If you try to be all things to all people, you'll mean nothing to everyone. Strategy is about making choices. The same is true of innovation. Put a stake in the ground. Define your primary and secondary audiences, including demographics, psychographics and behaviours. Focus gives you clarity when insight hunting.
Spot the known knowns and known unknowns
Like most organisations, you will have a treasure trove of past market research, existing data sets, and ad hoc qualitative and quantitative reports. Start by mining these for information: what you know (known knowns) and what you don't know (known unknowns). Often, these reports are overlooked. They are considered irrelevant because they were commissioned for other purposes. Regardless, there will be nuggets buried in these reports that, when viewed with a fresh perspective, will create hunches and thought starters. Group your hunches into themes and identify areas to explore. These become hypotheses to test out and the focus of your insight-hunting plan.
Data is not insight
Insight is the capacity to gain a deep understanding of someone or something. Data alone is not enough. Data often tells you what is happening. To understand why, you need to dig deeper.
Most habits, behaviours, and rituals are unconscious and unarticulated. Over time, they happen on autopilot. So if you book a holiday, undergo complex hospital treatment, or make your kid's tea time meals while juggling homework, teasing out a deep knowledge of the frustrations, workarounds, and pain points are unlikely to be spotted via an online survey or questionnaire.
Use your data points to generate hypotheses, then spend time with users to probe the why to gain empathy for people's unmet needs. Methods like ethnography, observation, and in-depth interviews will uncover a rich and vivid picture of your users' unarticulated needs.
Super users
Often, the most compelling innovation insights come from the periphery. These might be your super users, tinkerers and hackers who have already created workarounds because a product doesn't work as intended. They are already several steps ahead of everyone else.
For instance, if you are developing a new healthcare service, there may be clinics with much better-reported health outcomes. Talk to them to find out what they are doing that others aren't. If you want to improve commuter rail travel, talk to extreme travel users and globetrotters. You can uncover fresh inspiration by understanding the workarounds and routines they concoct.
While not considered traditional 'market research', these approaches are fertile sources of unexpected innovation insights.
Understand the context
Systems thinking
Systems thinking looks at a problem holistically and the relationships and interactions within the system. When innovating, ask, 'What system am I operating in here, what is the broader context, and what are the implications for where I go insight hunting?'
For FMCG goods, consumer journeys are more fragmented regarding what influences attitudes and purchase behaviours. For services, too narrow a view means you don't put your users at the centre of thinking and experience the entire journey as they do. For most projects, we now map the end-to-end user journey to generate hypotheses to test at each step to spot the pain points and opportunities.
Zoom in, zoom out
Too often, innovators take a narrow view of their sector or the problem, which can be self-limiting. How you perceive your product or service most likely differs from real-life user experiences.
For instance, snack bar consumers would probably consider alternatives such as protein drinks, yogurts, and healthier, less processed snacking options. This wider frame of reference has implications for capturing new insights compared to a narrow manufacturer's view of the snack bar category.
What if you were designing kids' meals for busy families, juggling homework before they nip out to swimming lessons? Parents, on the one hand, probably want something easy, quick, tasty and filling for their kids, but on the other, meet their aspirations for 'home-cooked,' i.e. being a good parent is about not feeling guilty for taking too many shortcuts. They, indeed, won't be defining their needs and aspirations through a product or category lens.
By zooming in and out of the context, you can spot multiple needs and redefine the 'jobs to be done' by putting yourself in your consumers' shoes.
Co-Design
A great way to prod and probe for unexpected insights is via co-design workshops. On projects we often bring a diverse range of users and stakeholders together to investigate the jobs to be done. Using a range of inspiration, projective techniques and stimulus materials (concepts/prototypes/user journey maps), we can explore hypotheses to unpack the different needs throughout the journey. This approach helps us uncover the unknown unknowns. Surface the unexpected insights. And understand how to solve a meaningful problem and what value we have to offer to be relevant and distinctive.
When done well, CoDesign helps you pressure test your hypotheses and assumptions and avoid biases and groupthink - a barrier to successful innovation.
Technology insights
When did you last spend time with your R&D team or service partners to fully understand what makes your product or service unique that could give you a competitive advantage? Is it the technology or unique processes?
Do you have unique capabilities that allow you to offer unmatched consumer experiences?
Technology deep-dive
In the front end of an innovation project, get answers to these questions. They become the foundation of 'technology insights' that can drive new combinations of product formulations to create winning products or differentiating claims.
For service design, you can experiment with combining your capabilities (people/process/technology) to create meaningful, distinctive user experiences.
By involving your technical experts in the CoDesign process, you can connect consumer/user insights with technology insights to satisfy consumer needs in novel and distinctive ways.
If you want help discovering new innovation insights that provoke unexpected ideas and solutions, drop us a line. We’d love to help!