Ideas Generated Through Traditional Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Oct 21, 2008
The innovation life-cycle through traditional market research involves qualitative and quantitative research in a rich process:
Someone in a line of business has questions that they need help with. Why are widget sales down in the West? Engineering has an interesting new technology, what might customers do with it? Sales in a niche channel are growing rapidly; might there be a larger opportunity here? Initially, the questions are broad and vague. You need to flesh out these questions.
The market-research department convenes a focus group or series of focus groups to gather together customers, prospects, distributors – whoever the key constituency is – to get their reaction to the broad questions and to brainstorm possible ideas. “Why did you buy a competitor’s gadget instead of our widget? What types of customers are coming through your doors, Mr. Reseller? How might you use our products if we leveraged this new technology?”
The researcher writes up the findings from the qualitative research and shares the key themes with the internal business owner. The results provide detailed case studies and profiles of different types of respondents: the prospect who bought the gadget instead of the widget solely based on price, the prospect who realized the gadget could do more for him than the widget, the prospect who bought because of the celebrity endorsement of Gidget, and so on!
The qualitative research results have helped the line-of-business owner focus their inquiry. They now have some clear questions that they would like to have answered. Key for them is to understand the extent of the behaviors uncovered in the qualitative-research process. How common are these views of price, features and endorsements? Which features are most important? How can the different challenges be prioritized? The researcher develops and fields a survey instrument to answer these questions.
The survey results are in, and they help highlight the priorities for the organization: what features are needed for widgets to better sell against gadgets, how the nontraditional distribution channel might emerge into a broader channel in the future, which features enabled by the new technology are most valuable to customers.
A few issues emerged from the quantitative research that were a surprise, so a final round of research is in order: another focus group or some personal interviews following up with survey respondents or a subsequent survey to a subsegment of the original respondents. This qualitative-quantitative-qualitative cycle provides the ultimate in thoroughness.
The original questions of the business staff have been rigorously evaluated to come up with the best ideas for the business. Another successful research effort! Now, if only it didn’t have to take three to six months to complete.
Tomorrow’s post: Compressing the idea-generation life cycle.