In order to be successful, businesses need to be able to innovate and come up with new ideas. This can be difficult, especially if you don't have a process in place for doing so. In this blog post, we will discuss the 5 steps to creating a winning innovation process. By following these tips, you will be able to predictably create great products that will grow your business and benefit your customers.
1) Focus on your customer first, not business activities.
Most people think that they need to focus on how to market a product and sell it first, but that's never the case. In order to create a winning product, you need to focus on what the customer wants and needs before anything else. If you can't identify a problem that your customers have, then it'll be difficult to come up with a solution.
Start by talking to your customers and getting feedback from them. By figuring out their relationship with your product, you'll be able to understand what needs to be improved. Once you have created a product that effectively solves for the desired outcomes of using it, you can focus on sales and marketing strategies.
2) Focus on underserved outcomes of using your product.
Understanding your customers' surface-level relationship with a product is not enough. In order to create something innovative, you need to have a deep understanding of their desired outcomes. What does your customer want to achieve by using your product (that they aren't already)?
Think about the different stages of using a product, and try to identify any underserved outcomes. For example, let's say you're selling a new type of toothbrush. The surface-level relationship is that the customer wants to brush their teeth. However, the desired outcome is to have healthy teeth and gums. There are many underserved outcomes in this scenario, such as preventing cavities, removing plaque, and whitening teeth.
In order to engineer an innovative toothbrush, it would need to have some sort of technology that solved for these underserved outcomes. This could be something as simple as a new type of bristles that are more effective at removing plaque.
3) Define your market around the problem, not the solution.
When you're trying to come up with a new product or service, it's tempting to define your market around what you're selling. However, this is usually not the best way to go about things. It's much more effective to define your market around the problem that you're solving.
This means that you need to start by understanding your customer's needs, not their wants. When you're solving a problem, you're automatically appealing to a larger market than when you're selling a solution.
4) Ideate and prototype only after you've solved the problem.
Once you've understood your customer and their desired outcomes, it's time to start ideating. However, don't start prototyping until you have a solution that solves the problem. This is where most people go wrong – they start building something before they even know what they're building.
The best way to avoid this is to use a design thinking process. This involves understanding the problem, finding potential solutions in user research, prototyping the best ones, and then testing them with customers. Only after you've validated the solution should you start building it out into a full-fledged product or service.
5) Consider innovation consulting.
If you aren't quite sure how to go about implementing an innovation process, it might be worth considering innovation consulting. This is where you bring in an external consultant to help you with the process. They'll be able to provide guidance and advice at every stage, from understanding your customer to prototyping and testing solutions.
Innovation consulting can be a great way to get started with product development, especially if you're not quite sure where to begin. However, it's important to note that innovation is a journey, not a destination. The best way to become truly innovative is to keep learning and growing along the way.
By following these tips, you'll be well on your way to creating a winning innovation process. Just remember to keep learning and growing, and you'll be sure to succeed.
Reurge is an innovation consulting firm focused on new innovative ideas and creating winning products.
We divert ordinary ideas into an inventive way and deliver business breakthroughs via strategy development for new product, service, and business model innovation.In our capacity development work as per customer needs, we research new products for different industries like Agriculture, Automobile, Aviation, Banking & Finance, Bio-Medical, Energy material Environment, Information Technology, and create sustainable innovation.https://www.reurge.com/services/innovation-consulting-firm/
