ABC of Innovation - M: Mega trend

M: Mega trend

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Lao Tzu

Mega trends are the general long-term developments in markets and consumer behaviour

Mega trends have a big impact on society and remain relevant for a long period of time. They are a great source of inspiration when you define a new strategy, or when you want to innovate your products and services. A mega trend should explain what consumers value now and in the future and how their behaviour will change because of that. Mega trends don’t have to be abstract and difficult to understand: by linking changing consumer behaviour to concrete examples from today’s niche markets, mega trends become concrete and easy to work with.

Did you know that…

Mega trends – trends that are relevant for at least 10 years – always come in pairs of opposite trends. Some examples:

• Global - Local

• Materialism – Consciousness

• Acceleration – Deceleration

• Individual - Collective

SunIdee developed a tool based on mega trends, linking the mega trends to customer desires. For each desire concrete examples are given. You can use these examples as inspiration for your own business.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - L: Lead User

L: Lead user

“Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.” Ludwig von Mises

Lead users are customers that experience a need before a commercial solution is available and creatively come up with custom solutions to fulfil this need.

Lead users seek a solution for an extreme or demanding version of the problem. For this reason, lead users are a great source of inspiration when researching needs and trends in any innovation project. For both incremental and breakthrough innovation.

Did you know that…

Mobile banking was not invented by mobile companies or banks, but by customers in rural Africa. They used airtime cards to transfer money to their family in their home village. A person would call a mobile phone owner in the village with a code for mobile credit. After subtracting a small fee, the mobile phone owner would give cash to the family of the person who was calling.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - K: Kano analysis

K: Kano analysis

“If you want to stay in business, satisfy customers. If you want to excel in business, delight customers.” Ron Kaufman

Kano analysis is a technique for classifying customer needs and determining appropriate levels of innovation for products and services.

Product development always comes with trade-offs. Kano analysis helps you classify product features into three categories:

• Basic: without it, people don’t want to buy your product.

• Performance: customers can compare several products and tend to choose the best specification. For example gas mileage or waiting time.

• Excitement: the features customers wouldn’t expect, but highly appreciate. They evoke a “wow”-feeling.

This classification helps to get an overview of what is really important to your customer, so you can develop a product that excites your customer.

Did you know that…

Expectations of customers change. Features that where once regarded to be exciting are now regarded to be basic features. This shows it is necessary to keep innovating. For example: the Wii game console from Nintendo was the first game console that incorporated the social/family gaming element. With the motion controller everybody could play. This was regarded very exciting especially by parents that wanted to play along with their kids. Now the Xbox Kinect and Playstation Move also have motion control, making it a basic feature.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - J: Joint Development

J: Joint Development

“We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it’s a liberation from our misconceptions.” Kirby Ferguson

Joint development is a way to combine the strengths of your organization with those of others and bring a product to the market together.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is essential to developing a strong product portfolio. Collaborating with other organizations to combine strengths might help you to create new products that combine the best from multiple worlds. These days open innovation is one of the most popular ways to execute joint development.

Did you know that…

Philips and Douwe Egberts successfully developed the Senseo coffee making system together. Combining the great expertise of Douwe Egberts in coffee and Philips’ knowledge about electronics made them sell more then 15 million units in the first four years after the product launch in 2001. Ten years later, over 33 million Senseo coffee machines have been sold worldwide.

Over 10 million miles were logged with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit – developed by Nike and Apple – in the first ten weeks after introduction. That is the equivalent of running around the world over 40 times.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - I: Insights

I: Insights

“One great insight is worth a thousand great ideas.” Phil Dusenberry

Consumer or customer insights describe the underlying motivation that drives customer behaviour.

Insights are a crucial starting point for idea generation and essential in any innovation project, both B2B and B2C. You won’t discover insights from behind your desk; you need to go out there and interact with your customers to really understand what drives them. Combine the insights you acquired with the strengths of your organization or brand, and you will be able to create differentiating added value for the long term.

Did you know that…

A very successful example of a product based on a strong insight is the Levi’s Curve ID. Levi’s found that 75% of women fit 10 pairs of jeans on average before they find one that is acceptable. Shopping for jeans is considered a difficult task that women dread. By scanning the bodies of 60.000 women, Levi’s was able to come up with 3 body types: slight, demi and bold curved. With the introduction of jeans for these 3 body types women can now quickly find the perfect fitting jeans and shopping for jeans becomes fun again.

SunIdee organises insights trainings to teach your team how to discover insights, describe them well and how to place insights at the core of your new product.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - H: hype

H: Hype

“You can hype a questionable product for a little while, but you’ll never build an enduring business.” Victor Kiam

A hype is a product or service that seems to be an instant hit, hyped by media attention, and that disappears shortly after, as quickly as it seemed to have appeared.

The hyped product gets a lot of attention, making customer expectations of the product rise sky-high. To make your new product successful in the long term you have to live up to your customers’ expectations by having a good value proposition. In addition you should innovate constantly to make your product ‘sticky’ or come up with amazing new products to prevent your customers from turning to the competition once they have lost interest in your product.

Did you know that…

A great example of a hype is the game Wordfeud. It was able to grow rapidly via internet because of the social sharing aspect. Shortly here after the traditional media picked it up and helped Wordfeud to grow even faster. Unfortunately for Wordfeud they were not able to keep the attention of their users. People got bored with it and quickly turned to the next hype in mobile gaming.

Angry Birds is one of the best examples of a product that went from hype to long-term business success. Their success lies in the combination of addictive gameplay, with different levels that open up new features, low price and comical style. Launched in 2009, and over a billion downloads to date, it is the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - G: gamification

G: Gamification

“Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.” - Donald Trump

Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts.

A gaming element is added to everyday activities to activate people to use products and services differently or more often because they like it. The competitive element – competing against others or themselves - helps people change their behaviour.

Did you know that…

Foursquare makes sharing your location with friends online more fun. Depending on how many times and with whom you checked in you can earn badges with titles such as: adventurer, explorer, superstar and entourage. In addition you can get personal discounts at the places you check in, which stimulates return visits.

Volkswagen initiated thefuntheory.com to show that something as simple as fun can change people’s behaviour for the better. For example: making the stair of a Swedish metro station look and sound like a piano led to an increase of 66% of people taking the stairs.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - F: fuzzy front end

F: Fuzzy Front End

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Ansel Adams

The Fuzzy Front End is the unclear and undefined beginning of the innovation process.

It is the phase where important strategic decisions are made. The fuzzy front end entails formulating an innovation strategy, ideation, concept creation, business model generation and building a robust business case. And ideally involving future customers in all steps of the process. This phase is characterized by the large amounts of information. It can be hard to find a structure in all this and make the best choices. That is why a lot of companies slow down in this part of the process.

Did you know that…

One of the best ways to make your company more innovative and increase the number of innovations you bring to market is to structure the fuzzy front end of your innovation process. Most companies focus on squeezing out development time in order to reduce time to market, since they only start measuring after approving a business case. Very few people realize that it easily took over a year from the initial idea to an approved business case.

Visual tools are a good way to create overview in the Fuzzy Front End, clarify strategy and communicate intermediary results to colleagues who are not a part of the project team.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - E: end-user driven innovation

E: End-User Driven Innovation

“To charge up customers, put customers in charge.” Eric von Hippel

End-user driven innovation is putting the end-user at the heart of your innovation process.

Although this might start to become a cliche, keeping your customers in mind is crucial for creating a ‘Wow effect’. For every satisfied customer that tells one friend about their product experience, a dissatisfied customer tells six friends. Customer insights and product evaluations help you to understand the needs of your customers and create more customer centric products.

Did you know that…

Although you might think you discovered a gap in the market, that does not mean your new discovery fulfils a customer need. Having a clear understanding of the needs and desires of your target group can prevent your next product introduction from becoming a failure. For example: RJR Nabisco Holdings decided to launch a ‘smokeless’ cigarette, which they thought would fill a gap in the market as it was not available yet. It took them a while to figure out that smokers actually like the smoke part of smoking. Needless to say the product was not very successful...

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.

ABC of Innovation - D: design thinking

D: Design Thinking

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford

Design thinking is a style of problem solving that starts off with clarifying the – often ill-defined – problem that you would like to resolve.

Although this is perhaps the most important task in the design process, it can be very hard. Therefore some teams tend to skip it and just dive into the development of a new product. But if you have a clear understanding of the problem and its context in the beginning, it becomes easier to work towards the right answers or solutions. This will save a lot of precious time. Knowing for whom and why you are developing a new product also helps to identify real customer needs and create more successful products that truly add value for your customer.

Did you know that…

If Einstein had only one hour to solve a problem he would take 55 minutes to frame the problem before coming up with actual solutions and answers. The term design thinking was introduced by David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO, and the creator of Apple Computer’s first computer mouse.

The whole ABC of Innovation can be downloaded from our site by 'Pay-with-a-Tweet-or-post'.