Innovation that pays



Innovation that pays

by Joe Gammal, Mass High Tech News, 30 August 2004

by Joe Gammal

Why do many technological innovations, whether incremental or truly breakthrough, never achieve market success? Rather than technological failure, the pivotal reason is a lack of true customer relevance - either in the product itself or the way in which it is described and marketed.

In the past 40 years, there have been thousands of technical geniuses amid the Massachusetts computer, software, Internet and biotech communities. But a key reason there aren’t more commercial successes is the absence of deep insights on the needs, wants, beliefs and motivations of customers - including distributors, partners and end consumers.

Gaining this customer insight is well practiced in lower-tech industries like consumer-packaged goods, where technological innovation isn’t as prevalent. Consumer products have to be on the mark with consumers to have a chance of making it. Leveraging deep insights can be just as powerful in the technology sector - possibly more so since too few avail themselves of this opportunity for differentiation.

There are two critical points where technology companies can add deep customer insights into the creative mix and create innovation that truly connects - early in the process of inventing breakthroughs and, later, when communicating them.

The common thinking in technology-driven companies is that customer input during the invention stage is marginally valuable because customers can’t imagine a product they’ve never seen before, or they can articulate only incremental improvements to what already exists. Unfortunately, what is missed is the opportunity to tap customers’ underlying, and often unconscious, needs and motivations.

Consider Dixie Foodservice, a manufacturer of packaging for the restaurant industry. In 2002, Dixie set out to harvest new technologies and material science advances to leapfrog the state of the art in the food service and meal preparation business. They began by getting inside the minds and hearts of their customers - the restaurant operators and their customers. The Dixie team participated in “creative discovery” sessions and deep-dive interviews with staff from the casual dining, lodging, hospital, convenience store, quick-service and other key food-service segments.

Dixie learned what customers really hated about conventional carry-out packaging and what was most important - like, for example, wanting their creations to be presented as beautifully in the home as they are in the restaurant and a simplified way of handling complex food assembly tasks because of a relatively unskilled, transient labor pool. The many insights they discovered were creatively combined with new technologies in their R&D labs to feed their internal invention sessions.

The result: A line of six new products that re-energized Dixie’s food service business, delivering excellent sales and picking up six Foodservice Packaging Innovation Awards along the way.

OK, sounds good, but what if the product is already done? It’s not too late.

Like the product invention stage, the marketing stage can significantly exploit deep customer insight. Many high tech products do, in fact, deliver a truly superior way of meeting an important need. Where many companies falter is in communicating those technology breakthroughs in a way that is real and relevant. Too often the focus is on specifications and features, and even if a benefit-based positioning is attempted, it’s without knowing what’s truly going on in the minds of technology customers - the users, influencers and buyers who are seldom technologists.

When Lotus Notes inventor Ray Ozzie founded Groove Networks in 1997, little did he realize that the peer-to-peer Internet collaboration software he was developing would connect so strongly with a growing need in today’s world: The need for workgroup autonomy and independence that transcends organizational structures. For example, Groove’s technology lets humanitarian assistance agencies coordinate their actions in Iraq without having to use a system hosted by the U.S. Department of Defense. According to Ozzie, “Groove essentially creates an ownerless online space in which everyone can share information equally, without somebody’s IT department having control.” While this customer insight may not have been at the forefront in 1997, it’s clearly a new opportunity for Groove in its marketing today.

As the high tech industry comes off its worst cycle in decades, the ability to smartly leverage customer insights the way consumer products leaders do - as a stimulus in both the early invention and the marketing of a new solution - can be the difference between market failure and successful market innovation.

Joe Gammal is a principal with Synectics Inc., a 40-plus-year-old global innovation consultancy in Cambridge.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download