Shouldn’t you be able to trust the people who buy your products and consume your services to tell you honestly about how they use your products and services? It’s a well known observation that we say one thing and do another. Don’t trust your users? That’s pretty cold hearted wouldn’t you think?
A great example of this phenomena is the consumption of ecologically grown food. When polled, shoppers exaggerate their habits and will almost always try to appear more green (intentions) than they in fact are (outcomes). We want to be more ecologically minded and we want to project that intention. It’s just that the intention and the actual doing are two separate things. Continue Reading »
John Landerholm on May 12th 2009 in outcome driven innovation
Don’t trust your sales people for relaying proper user input for product development. When starting any new product development it is necessary to have good user input. Discovering unmet market needs is the most critical aspect of this process. Just don’t trust your sales people to supply the input.
For at least 3 good reasons, have a look at this article.
A good article about how and why the user driven innovation process in new product development fails. A 50% failure rate isn’t impressive at all. Most managers would prefer blind luck and intuition to those odds.
In response to a recent public critique of its methodology by a competitor, Strategyn is releasing today a white paper entitled A New Perspective on VOC
, which highlights the business advantages of Strategyn’s innovation methodology and the strategic and tactical differences between it and traditional voice-of-the-customer (VOC) practices. Continue Reading »
John Landerholm on February 12th 2009 in outcome driven innovation
Gerry Katz of Applied Marketing Science Authors Critique of Outcome-Driven Innovation Garry Katz has uncovered some troubling weaknesses in Anthony Ulwicks methodology as a tool for new product development. Here are some of the topics he includes in the critique:
- How Outcome-Driven Innovation differs from traditional Voice of the Customer techniques
- Data collection methodologies and questioning techniques
- Level of detail, i.e. the case for an affinity diagram
- Fixed syntax vs. customer language
- Strategyn’s Opportunity Algorithm
The article in pdf format can be downloaded here.
John Landerholm on February 10th 2009 in outcome driven innovation
When creating, developing and marketing new innovative products it is critical to have the best input possible. The traditional user-driven innovation supplies R&D with lots of user input. The problem being, they are the wrong type of inputs.
Users are lobbied for their wishes, requirements and suggestions for new products. Taken at face value these inputs are if not worthless, at the very least useless. Continue Reading »
John Landerholm on February 8th 2009 in outcome driven innovation