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How Communities Change the Innovation Process

At Research 2010: The Annual Conference, Doron Meyassed of Promise Communities presented "Sex, Lies and Chocolate: How communities can change the way you think about innovation for good." With 80% of new product introductions failing, Doron argues that "the practice of innovation is broken". He then outlined four ways that communities are changing the innovation process for the better. Changing innovation:

1. "From following the ‘rules of research' to following the ‘rules of people'." Many of the traditional rules of scientific marketing research - anonymous sponsors, anonymous respondents, respondents who participate just once, hidden research intent - are completely flouted by communities. The "rules of people" require you to identify yourself, to commit to working with participants for weeks or months, and to explain what you are doing and why. Rather than ask for opinions, ask for creativity. Rather than expect to come up with the answers yourself, ask consumers to help you understand what's important.
2. "From an internal and expert-driven locus of control and creativity to a decentralized and co-creative one." Instead of having management set the agenda, have consumers set the agenda. Too often the innovations that management thinks are important are not the ones that consumers are interested in.
3. "From a project-based model to an iterative and integrated one." Customer input often brackets the traditional innovation process: qualitative research is conducted upfront to understand the appeal of ideas, then those ideas are compromised to be feasible as they are translated into actual products; three possible editions of the product are tested to determine which is best. Everyone pats themselves on the back for including the customer. Truly including the customer, however, means turning to the customer for feedback each step of the way, iteratively. If engineering has to suggest other solutions based on technical capabilities, customer feedback is immediately solicited on those tradeoffs, rather than waiting till the end of the process.
4. "From on-the-spot evaluation to real life evaluation." On-the-spot evaluation - a five-minute assessment in a survey or a 90-minute assessment in a focus group - is often inadequate for evaluating new ideas. Snap judgments are often wrong, as customers prefer the familiar, and the time invested is too short for acquired tastes: "I am convinced that the big breakthroughs come from acquired tastes". When the consumer can spend more time contemplating the ideas, they are going to provide a better evaluation of their appeal.

Where's the sex, lies and chocolate of the presentation title? Research in online communities requires a new kind of customer intimacy, an intimacy that may seem especially awkward to market researchers trained to keep a distance from the population being studied. But, given the lack of success of traditional innovation processes, nurturing customer intimacy may lead to new success.