Insights - why are they important for innovators?

Failure rates for innovation are very high. Research by Nielsen shows that poor innovation performance is the result of not addressing two critical factors:

• Solving an unmet need

• Delivering a great - and unique - experience

The first factor means that someone will try your product or service ('that looks intriguing, I'll give this a go!').

The second factor means they'll come back more than once (‘Wow, that was great, better than the alternative, I'll be back for more!’).

Nielsen estimates that for consumer goods, it takes about seven purchases for a consumer to become a truly loyal buyer. Without a strong product experience, it will never make it to that eighth purchase.

So what can you do to improve your innovation success rates?

Crucially, you need to spend time with target consumers to understand their unresolved needs. Also, involve these consumers as you prototype, experiment and optimise your final product.

Have a target audience in mind when designing new products and services - it helps you shape more relevant and engaging solutions to their needs

Successful innovators have a target customer or end-user in mind.

Why does this help? It puts you in their shoes and enables you to think about the context of using your new idea and how to empathise with users' problems.

It gets you wondering:

• What alternatives are they using?

• How does my idea compare with these?

• What experience are they looking for?

• What problems are they trying to solve?

• How do they talk about these problems?

• What are they willing to pay a bit more for?

• Why have they switched to alternatives?

• What are the barriers to use?

• How do we grab their attention?

You'll have to work through these (and many more) questions as you design and optimise your idea.

Over time you'll build a pen portrait of what your target users are thinking, feeling and doing. Use this to shape your ideas to make them relevant.

Such provocative questions force a reappraisal of the problems you need to solve.

Your product or service has to deliver a great and unique experience.

How often do you buy something because you're sold on the idea, only to try it and be massively disappointed with the experience? As we saw above, there isn't much room for this. If you lose too many people after the first trial, the chances that your idea will survive are limited.

Nielsen shows that you are 15 times more likely to succeed with strong product performance. In contrast, consumer products deemed 'not ready' on product-driven dimensions - but launched anyway - have an 80% failure rate.

Clearly, you will benefit from spending more time upfront optimising concepts.

Crucially, as you cycle through prototypes, you should involve target consumers. They'll point out flaws, where and how to optimise the user experience.

For instance, we run co-creation sessions with client teams and consumers to experiment with ideas using agile human-centred design techniques. In the right environment, consumers are adept at pointing out necessary features to strengthen appeal and uniqueness.

When presented with prototype concepts, consumers also point out things you hadn't thought of, which are not immediately top of mind, yet essential. Time and again, we see these 'Aha' moments jump-starting new ideas and pointing the team on a new trajectory.

Indeed, these interactions allow you to pressure test many different assumptions and hypotheses.

Involve your target users and stakeholders to incubate ideas to maximise their potential

Moreover, innovative solutions require you to think about the holistic user experience: how and where they will hear about this, the experience at multiple touch-points, how to anticipate and address barriers to adoption, claims and messaging at critical points along the user journey, brand tone of voice, etc.

With the help of target users, co-creation helps identify multiple improvements and remove likely frustrations, to enhance the users' experience.

To sum up:

• Have a target audience in mind. It helps identify the questions you need to answer.

• People want solutions, not products. Identify the problems are you solving for your target user and use this insight to design your product.

• A fantastic user experience is a vital success factor. Spend more time prototyping and experimenting to optimise your concept and spot unexpected customer needs.

• Get consumer input at crucial stages of development to ensure you are on track to develop a winning idea.

Source Nielsen Setting the record straight on innovation failure