In previous notes I’ve commented that a recurring theme at Convergence was how customer needs play a very important role in a company’s innovation and new product development efforts. A specific presentation on this theme was “Customer-Centric Innovation: Turning Consumer Pain Into Innovative New Products” by Tom Kuczmarski and Scott Lutz (contact info at link isn't current for Scott, but it's a good description of him!).

Tom quoted a 2003 best practices study his company did: 85% of CEO respondents said conducting customer problem/need identification research prior to ideation is the most important driver of new product/service success in their organizations.

A main reason why research for new product development should focus on consumer needs and an understanding of consumer’s lives – rather than product and service attributes – is that the resulting ideas are more likely to be true breakthroughs.

This makes absolute sense to me. If you focus on needs, you’ll come up with new products that meet those needs. These products may or may not resemble current offerings, but at the very least they shouldn’t be so far out in left field (a common problem with unfocused new product development efforts) that they don’t still meet those needs, since that was the objective.

On the other hand, when you focus on researching what consumers do and don’t like about an existing product, the best you can expect is incremental improvement suggestions.

For those in the B2B world, the exploratory research needs to focus around understanding companies and the roles your customers play in their companies, Tom says.

One more point Tom made about starting with pain – your new products are more likely to be profitable if they enable the solution to a problem on which consumers place a “higher need intensity.”

Scott’s portion of the presentation focused on the “evergreen” themes, ongoing consumer needs that many successful new products address: family, health, pleasure, energy, balance and community.

To uncover more focused needs than these, and to drill down into these evergreen themes and uncover specific needs, you need qualitative, not quantitative, research. In my opinion, these qualitative tools – depth interviews, lead-user interviews and ethnographic research – are the best ways to uncover the fears, wishes, anxieties, desires, frustrations and needs by which consumers express their pain. Quantitative research won’t be nearly as revealing, because it’s not exploratory.

Having noted all of that – you may recall that I had a conversation here last month with Andy Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, that takes this idea one step further. Our conversation was about how consumers can be an “open source” for new product ideas. I said then, using consumers for ideation, especially those screened for past product category usage, makes sense from the point of view that the consumers have both domain relevant knowledge (as potential users of the new product) and have creativity skills.

Relating this back to Tom and Scott’s presentation – let’s say you start with some qualitative research around discovering actual consumer pain (cognitive dissonance!). You’d use that as a starting point for ideation, as Tom pointed out in the presentation. But then let’s say you are doing that ideation with consumers who have usage experience in that product category. Their own “pain” is the specific domain-relevant knowledge that keeps them on focused on actual usable ideas, and their creativity is the spark that makes the ideas good.