How do you handle competition and differentiation in product innovation?
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The first step to product innovation is to understand your customers' needs, problems, preferences, and expectations. You can use various methods to gather customer insights, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, user testing, feedback, analytics, and personas. By empathizing with your customers, you can identify their pain points, motivations, and goals, and use them as the basis for generating and validating your product ideas.
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In my experience the best way for customer discovery is: “GO OUT AND TALK TO THEM YOURSELVES”! I have 4 concrete tips for you: 1. Immerse as an anthropologist among your potential customers without being judgmental. 2. Find out what really relevant for them in their lives at this moment. 3. Identify their jobs-to-be-done and the major issues related to the context of your scope. 4. Do customer discovery before your ideation process YOURSELVES with your whole tam, as the experience is as important as the results. When as immerse in your target group yourself you will understand their situation, their needs, their jobs to be done more profoundly than any other method. You will never forget your customer vists ?????.
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Fiona Stevenson
CEO/Co-Founder at The Idea Suite | Innovation Expert | P&G Alumni | Speaker | Author
Insights are critical to any innovation journey - but when your budget or timelines are too constrained for new work - you can activate the current insights in your business. Use an innovation lens to truffle hunt previous research decks or other sources of consumer feedback - paying particular attention to unmet needs, areas of tension, workarounds, or expressed desires.
The second step to product innovation is to analyze your competitors' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You can use tools such as SWOT analysis, Porter's five forces, benchmarking, and competitive matrix to assess how your competitors are performing, what they are offering, and how they are positioning themselves in the market. By understanding your competitors, you can identify gaps, trends, and niches in the market, and leverage your unique value proposition to differentiate your product.
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A much better way is a SOAR analysis, as it takes a more positive approach. SOAR stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. Here's how the SOAR analysis framework works: 1. Strengths: Identify and leverage your organization's existing strengths and capabilities. Focus on what your company does well. 2. Opportunities: Identify external factors or trends that could create opportunities for your organization's growth or success. 3. Aspirations: Clearly define your organization's vision and goals. What do you want to achieve? Use this as a guide to steer your strategic decisions. 4. Results: Determine the specific outcomes or results you want to achieve. Think about the measurable impact and the desired end state.
The third step to product innovation is to define your innovation strategy, which is the plan and direction for how you will create and deliver value to your customers and stakeholders. You can use frameworks such as the innovation matrix, the innovation funnel, the innovation portfolio, and the innovation roadmap to guide your decision-making and prioritization of your product ideas. Your innovation strategy should align with your business goals, vision, mission, and values, and reflect your competitive advantage and customer value proposition.
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Tip: Using the 3 HORIZONS MODEL of MCKINSEY is a great framework to help you balance short-term with long-term strategic innovation planning. Horizon 1: This horizon represents the core business activities. The focus in this horizon is on optimizing existing operations, improving efficiency, and incrementally enhancing products. Horizon 2: Horizon 2 focuses on emerging opportunities for growth. It involves exploring new markets or adapting existing products to new customer needs. Horizon 3: This horizon focuses on disruptive innovation. It involves exploring new technologies, business models, and markets. To apply this model to innovation, you need to allocate resources and attention across the three horizons in a balanced way.
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Innovation is a trendy and sexy word at the C-suite level, however; that doesn't mean that the executives are realistic and pragmatic about their enterprise capabilities, skills, capacity, and funds to innovate. It is always a good thing to calibrate "innovation" with the capabilities of the enterprise and reconcile enthusiastic C-suite buzz talk about innovation and the Execs and/or enterprise's real tolerance for risks.
The fourth step to product innovation is to implement your innovation process, which is the set of activities and methods that you will use to develop and launch your product. You can use approaches such as design thinking, lean startup, agile, and scrum to manage your innovation process in a flexible, iterative, and customer-centric way. Your innovation process should involve cross-functional teams, collaboration, experimentation, prototyping, testing, learning, and feedback loops.
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This is when the role of the "Innovator" must change to "Conductor/Shepard" to highly collaborate, and listen to Engineers, Operations, and folks on the ground. No matter how well-planned, the initial implementation will be messy. The innovator will have to sort out the real problems from the pushback from change.
The fifth step to product innovation is to measure your innovation outcomes, which are the results and impacts of your product on your customers and business. You can use metrics such as customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, referrals, revenue, profit, market share, and growth to evaluate your innovation outcomes. By measuring your innovation outcomes, you can track your progress, identify areas for improvement, and celebrate your successes.
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It is critical to have internal stakeholders' early alignment on the criteria and methods of measurement to evaluate the innovation. Asking simple questions will help you get alignment discussion going: What are we trying to do? Why are we doing it? for whom are we doing it?
The sixth and final step to product innovation is to learn from your innovation experience, which is the accumulation of knowledge, skills, and insights that you gain from your product development and launch. You can use tools such as retrospectives, post-mortems, case studies, and reviews to capture and document your innovation experience. By learning from your innovation experience, you can improve your innovation capabilities, culture, and performance, and prepare for future product innovation opportunities.
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Fiona Stevenson
CEO/Co-Founder at The Idea Suite | Innovation Expert | P&G Alumni | Speaker | Author
Retrospectives are a critical yet often missed step of the innovation journey. It can be an extremely valuable process to look back at the key stages of the project - and identify areas for process optimization. One of the key issues that can arise in an innovation journey is lack of key stakeholder alignment along the way - which can result in rework or slow down the momentum of a project. Identifying when and where timely stakeholder meetings could have been built into the process and building these into future innovation projects has the power to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your future innovation efforts and transform your innovation culture in the longer term.
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It are not only processes and methods which matter in product innovation. These days PERSONAL INNOVATION SKILLS are a major differentator. So check out also these 10 practical GUIDELINES to become an excellent innovator: 1. BE COURAGEOUS 2. ALIGN-TO STRATEGY 3. GET BUY-IN 4. PICK THE RIGHT TEAM 5. DISCOVER 6. BE CUSTOMER CENTERED 7. EXPERIMENT 8. PIVOT 9. BE RESILIENT 10. TRUST THE PROCESS Lots of success on your path becoming an amazing business developer and innovator. Innovative regards, Gijs
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