Sometimes the best ideas come from outside the company and, in particular, from end-users themselves. Connecting the business with external partners, engineers, scientists, experts and customers is a must to identify trends and develop new products closer to real customer needs before competitors do.
Co-creation initiatives involve not only capturing what customers want and need, but also letting them participate on the NPD process, with different roles at each stage to:
- Gain visibility into what customers want, and quantify how many want it;
- Capture ideas and requirements and categorize them in a usable way;
- Make decisions with greater certainty, bringing better products to market faster.
The particular case of lead users - users that have such a compelling need to solve their problems that they develop their own solutions- is a good example of the value of Open innovation initiatives. They are one of the best sources of insights into user needs and potential product prototypes. In some cases these users represent a very specialized market, but in many cases they anticipate the needs of the larger market. As such, their innovations have a high commercial value.
And studies clearly show that they have two other important advantages: allows faster development and a lower investment.
But identifying lead users could become a tough challenge without the proper tools, as a lot of research is needed. A five-step process is used to identify lead users, and then to incorporate their insights into the product design process:
- Identify a new market trend or product opportunity (e.g. greater computer portability, zero emission vehicles, etc.).
- Define measures of potential benefit. as they relate to customer needs.
- Select “lead users” who are “ahead of their time” and who will benefit the most from a good solution (e.g. power users).
- Extract information from the “lead users” about their needs and potential solutions . and generate product concepts that embed these solutions.
- Test the concepts with the broader market to forecast the implications of lead user needs as they apply to the market in general.
Our solution lets you manage all this process in one place and integrate the front-end of the process directly into your development process, keeping your R&D firmly based on the genuine voice of the customers.
Main Benefits
- Engage your customers - With our solution, external stakeholders feel comfortable to participate. Members can easily vote on ideas, or discuss and refine them. Related ideas and discussions can be linked, keeping everything intact all the way through your development process. The result is Social Product Planning – where your product decisions are based on accurate and detailed information provided directly by your customers.
- Public or by-invitation-only: you choose - Create both public and private communities to maximize reach while ensuring confidentiality and protecting intellectual property. Or, generate new ideas in a public community, and use a private advisory panel of your best customers to refine and flesh out the ideas most favorable in their eyes. And you can also define different web links for each of them, while using the same system.
- Make product decisions with greater certainty. No more flops – Our solution helps you to engage more people, less time to co-develop and prioritize ideas, concepts and features. When everybody agrees you immediately know that you should focus only in understand the specific issues where divergence abound, saving time and avoiding mistakes and bad investments in products no one wants.
- Invest in what customers want (and will pay for) - Align your products to markets, segments, customers, and specific needs, with complete traceability back to the source. You can factor specific customer needs and detailed insight into every decision you make.
- Accessible and secure - Say goodbye to post-it notes, paper files, and lost ideas buried in thousands of email messages. Our solution enables you to keep it all centralized, up-to-date, secure, and accessible on a role-by-role basis, providing visibility for any stakeholder in your process.
- Value of contributions matters - Identify and track the community members who contribute the most value by analyzing their activity and the past performance of their ideas. Then use reward systems to provide recognition and incentives to encourage even greater participation.
See our NPD solutions:
Do you still have some doubts? Ask us for more information
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