Ideas are not the problem…

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There is a myth in new product innovation that good ideas are hard to come by, but we find that most of our client are swimming in a pool of possibilities. Many of those ideas have been around the organization for a long time and some have been tested repeatedly – the output of great internal work from smart teams. Plus, Mission Field can also help to create another 50-100 great idea starters as part of our Energize work. Ideas are not the issue.

The real challenge of new product innovation is aligning the team to a singular innovation strategy based on the needs of a well-defined consumer target. A company can’t do it all, nor should it, but how it decides what it will focus on can affect its future path for success. While the strategy will have many sources of information that help to guide the where and why, it also has to interlace with the who: the target audience.

Getting to a good understanding of the needs of the target begins with deep empathetic focus. By that we mean a deliberate design target - the tightest, most homogenized consumer group that has a set of real problems that can be served with differentiated solutions. The innovation design target may start with a macro lens of existing, lapsed, or new users, but then it should dive much deeper into how they share demographic and attitudinal commonalities and how they struggle with the same product issues.

In our work with clients, we will spend a lot of time up front identifying one or more design targets to ensure the foundational learning is consistent and future idea vetting serves the right set of consumers. Even though we may repeat some “prior knowledge” already known by the organization, it is critically important to spend time doing ethnographies to re-hear their real-world problems and more clearly discuss how their needs and wants can be solved by the plethora of possible product ideas. The tighter the design target, the fewer consumer research touchpoints are needed in order to confidently build a strong innovation strategy and pipeline.

At Mission Field we build our client’s innovation strategy by listening to consumers, showing them possible solutions, understanding what resonates and then constantly iterating. Along the way we work to clarify guardrails, to understand key product attributes and to assess receptivity to changes in brand and design elements. In the end we bring to life the voice of the target consumer to help drive consumer-centric innovation pipelines.