Insights Goldmine: you may already hold the seed for your next innovation idea

This is relevant to you if:

• You aim to strengthen your innovation strategy & become a market driven-innovator
• You are trying to raise your innovation capability, building tools and methodologies to stay on top of trends and ahead of the market
• You seek the key to unlock commercially viable and feasible ideas which you can capitalise on
• You want to shift your culture and embed customer obsession and innovative thinking at the front-end of the innovation process.

Companies realise that they need to innovate, and fast.

Customer power and demands have never been stronger, whilst the pace of technology change has never been greater. Companies know that they need to accelerate the rhythm of innovation to meet the pace of these changes. No matter where you play, you already see your market being disrupted or you’re likely expecting this to happen very soon.

Many organisations are seriously looking at building innovation capabilities, able to harness and commercialise new ideas. Innovation labs, incubators and accelerators are popping up everywhere and companies are rushing to hire innovation heads and officers, in the hope that they will help them adopt new ways of working to become more innovative and commercially astute.

With scarce capital and, typically, seven out of ten innovation ideas flopping, innovation can be a costly and resource-draining exercise.

Innovation is more effective when insight-led and market-driven

As they perfect the art of running design sprints, in hope of accelerating their ability to bring to market new products and services, innovation teams can be at risk of overlooking the wealth of market knowledge that already exists in your company.

Too often, innovation efforts end up compartmentalised away in some hip-looking part of the building, away from insight, marketing, product and operations teams, who only seldom get called upon for the occasional sprint, rounded up haphazardly and disempowered.

Companies that have reached a certain level of organisational maturity in the innovation space recognise the need to turning the innovative esprit from technology-led to market-driven, and the need to engage the whole organisation in harnessing valuable existing market and customer knowledge.

Insight-rich companies are better at market-driven innovation

Whilst technology-led innovation develops solutions that often do not address a market need, market-driven innovation seeks to understand market needs and then develop solutions that addresses these needs.

Starting from well established insights can provide the focus required to spur innovation in the right direction by:

Keeping in tune with the market — it’s likely you already hold a substantial volume of information and knowledge about the important trends that are shaping your market. Harnessing market insights to suggest challenge themes that are aligned with your company’s ‘Must Win Battles’ can really focus your innovation strategy.

Creating tight, challenge briefs — bringing good quality insights up front in the innovation process can substantially raise the quality of the challenge brief. This, in turn, will help narrow and guide the ideation process. Fewer, higher quality ideas will eventually heighten the likelihood of commercial success at launch.

Reducing waste and increasing speed of execution — because fewer and better ideas need testing and prototyping, you can avoid wasting time in testing with customer concepts and prototypes which should never have reached this stage to start with. This will substantially stretch your market research dollars, whilst speeding up the innovation funnel.

So, what can you do about it?

Transitioning to market-driven innovation is grounded on four key building blocks:

Find valuable insights on current customer pains

A good deal of innovation is successful when focussing on addressing current customer pains. Your data is a goldmine in this sense, especially customer feedback, complaints and operational data. Sourcing or harnessing proprietary data from within and turning it into valuable insights creates actionable value and helps focus innovation on addressing real customer issues. Good research aligns with your business objectives and needs, identifies critical questions, designs research, executes or oversees studies that generate or leverage high-quality customer data, and maintains records of past studies.

Focus on where the market is heading next

Keeping a pulse on emerging trends and on how these influence and shape future customer needs and wants is the holy grail of innovation. When successful in tapping these trends companies can build a long lasting competitive advantage. Your research team is probably the best equipped and positioned to monitor and track future market evolutions: collaborating and feeding the innovation team with such insights will help you stay on top of the game.

Share and make the research accessible

Any disconnect between your research function and the innovation team is a problem in many companies. Being readily accessible and relevant is often the root cause. Innovation teams are often pressed to move fast and struggle with long, detailed presentations. Being able to divulge the key insights in an interactive, on-demand way will help the two teams build on each others’ strengths and collaborate more. Presenting data visually, making use of storytelling to spur also helps turn insights into actionable ideas. Finally, frequent and regular forums facilitating direct collaboration with innovation is always very effective.

Be proactive and own the issues.

Challenge your insight team to become a strategic insights partner and to own the must-win themes for the business, relentlessly looking for the fact base which can help guide innovation in addressing these issues. They should experiment with new data sources, technologies, and methodologies, analyze customer and behavioral data, and synthesize data sets from multiple consumer sources to convert findings into insights and inspiration.