Pick Your Poison – or Approach

How does your organization approach innovation? There are a number of different approaches we see across our portfolio of clients, including:

• Design Thinking: Great when you aren’t entirely sure about the problem or the user.
• Agile: Popular when trying to get a working version to market quickly.
• Jobs-to-be-Done: Discovering hidden market opportunities while leveraging current products.
• Stage-Gate: Leveraged with physical product development to avoid costly late-stage design changes.
• Open Innovation: Using design firms to rethink an established product or relying on crowdsourcing to inject fresh energy from outside sources into the product pipeline.

Not a Linear Path

Even after picking an approach, teams face operational, financial, and strategic realities. Innovation never happens in a vacuum. Product development teams must constantly balance corporate guardrails, including:

• Feasibility: Can we actually build and deliver a product at scale? The product development team has to look at supply chain realities, manufacturing capabilities, and even a technology stack.
• Viability: Can we make money? From margin benchmarks, opportunity assessment to capital requirements, each needs to be evaluated.
• Strategic Fit: Does the product fit our strategy and brand? Consider issues like cannibalization, risk, visual identity, and competency.
• Don’t Forget the Attorneys: Will the product pass any legal hurdles? Beyond IP issues, there may be compliance, regulatory or ESG issues to consider. 

When pressed by these organizational realities, teams may be pushed toward cost-optimization methods like Design-to-Value (DTV). Suddenly, a dynamic, human process is reduced to a series of sterile process-driven hurdles.

How Does an Insights Team and Its Partners Adapt

Even when companies say they follow a given roadmap to innovation (JTBD, Agile, Design Thinking, etc.), that doesn’t mean they all follow a strict, consistent methodology. Some companies don’t even have a defined approach. With B2B companies, it’s not unusual for customer requests or sales teams to drive the R&D and innovation process as voice-of-customer (VOC) initiatives are an afterthought.

That’s why it’s critical for an insights team and their partners to remain flexible to the needs and culture of the organization during the research design phase. MarketVision views the innovation cycle through a consumer-informed lens. While we often implement a multi-phase research process (below) in partnership with our clients, the key is to adapt to the needs of the organization, product lifecycle, budget, and any other constraints in coming up with the right solution. There is no one-size fits all solution.

Want to talk about your approach to insights within the innovation process or discuss these complex issues within your company? Just connect with a MarketVision client partner.

Contributions by Ben Bruggeman, Brian Dundon, David Santangelo, and Andrew Zoota.