How To Create People-Centric Product Innovation Ideas

Let’s talk about product innovation.

The journey into the unknown to explore the future of a category, generate innovative solutions, develop a winning product market strategy… and grow a business.

An experience that feels fast. Intense. Overwhelming. A bit like the wild west. But, also rewarding when you remember why you are developing new products in the first place… to solve real problems, for real people!

“How can I create new product innovation ideas If I don’t know where to start?” you may ask. Great question.

Let’s answer that by unpacking how to go about developing meaningful product innovation ideas, and exploring:

• What people-centric product innovation ideas are
• Who to have on your product innovation team
• Key Phases of a People-Centric Product Innovation Process 

…So that you can feel more prepared for your next rodeo.

 

First, what is people-centric product innovation?

Product innovation is the process through which companies conceive, design, and bring new products or services to the market. It involves a series of strategic steps, including ideation, design, testing, and refinement.

When you search for “stages of new product innovation” you’ll find plenty of lists, most of which start with idea generation. However, people-centric product innovation starts with understanding people first, with several touch points throughout the journey to ensure that people stay at the heart of what you do.

 

 

So, who should you have on your team for people-centric product innovation?

Product innovation requires a cross-functional team that stays along for every stage, which can include:

• Project Lead: Coordinates and oversees the project timeline, ensuring tasks are completed on schedule.
• Insights Lead: Acts as the voice of the consumer, keeping core insights about your target’s needs and wants at the forefront of everyone’s minds, at every stage.
• Brand and Marketing Leads: Develops strategies to promote and launch the product effectively in the market.
• Product Management Lead: Leads the overall product strategy, ensuring alignment with business goals and consumer needs.
• R&D Teams, Designers (UI/UX), Developers: Create the visual and user experience elements of the product, focusing on aesthetics and usability. And build the technical aspects of the product, translating design concepts into functional features.
• …To name a few! You may also need representatives from legal or compliance teams, finance, mergers and acquisitions.

Not only do you need the right roles, you need the right personalities. Product innovation is a dynamic and constantly evolving journey that can be ambiguous at times, and often demands a certain level of courage to leave the safety of the status quo. Having the right people in the room who can adapt and flex will help you get further, faster.

 

 

Key Phases Of A People-Centric Product Innovation Process

You have your team and are ready to go. Now, let’s take a look at the key phases of product innovation, and how they look when you make them more people centric.

Vision-Setting

Get clear on what the business goal for innovation is. Is it to win among a new target audience, enter a new category, adapt to new market realities? What guardrails or constraints can we use to set up parameters for this project?

While this isn’t what makes it people-centric, it’s a big part of staying on track, versus spinning your wheels.

Insider Tip: While big, broad ambitions are admirable, the best innovations come from laser-sharp focus and clarity. Focus just as much effort on defining what’s out of bounds, as you would defining what’s within bounds.

 

Discovery

This is where a traditional product innovation process becomes more people-centric. Rather than jumping right into idea generation, take a step back to get a holistic picture of the market. To do so, consider using a model called the 4Cs: Culture, Category, Consumer, Company.

Not only does it help you understand people and their needs, it helps paint a broader picture of their surrounding context, and the dynamics at play.

By the end of this phase, you should have an idea of the opportunity space(s) that you want to focus on for product innovation. Let’s unpack them

• Culture: Explore what’s happening in culture and define the macro forces that are impacting people today. Explore big topics, such as social and economic issues that can impact your category, and the people you want to target. What to use: Trend research, expert interviews (e.g. futurists, journalists, academic leaders) news in your market/region.
• Category: Dive deep into category trends, and do a competitive analysis to see what brands in your space, and in adjacent categories, are doing (or, not doing) as a result of these trends to identify potential opportunities and threats. What to use: Category publications, competitor websites, annual reports and marketing, recent conference buzz, category-specific experts who can give you insights that you wouldn’t typically find in a Google search.
• Consumer: Do primary research to better understand your target audience. Who are they, what are their lives like? How do they feel about your category, and what are their biggest unmet needs and problems to solve? Are there gaps your competitors are not addressing?What to use: Primary research, including digital diaries, ethnographies, interviews and group discussions are great ways to uncover people’s unmet needs. You might also consider quantitative research, if you need a foundational view of sizable motivations and jobs. Or, You might even consider doing both. 
• Company: Assess your own company’s strengths and weaknesses. What do you do well that you can further amplify with innovation? What weaknesses can new product innovation address? What to use: Previous SWOT analyses, brand health trackers, and other research – as well as one-on-ones with key stakeholders, to learn more about their perspectives, hypotheses, and insights that might not be found as easily in past reports.

Insider tip: The most important part of this process – talking to real, live people. Desk research is critical, but it’s conversations with stakeholders, experts and consumers early in the process that will have the greatest impact on this phase.

 

Ideation

Now’s the time to immerse the teams in insights, and workshop new product innovation ideas that could solve real problems, for real people! Workshops can be one day or many, however, most usually take this flow:

• Immerse teams: Share insights from the vision-setting and discovery phases, landing the white space opportunities you want to focus on.
• Start with divergent exercises: Draft exercises that will help teams think creatively about the problem. For instance, how might another brand outside your category solve it? (e.g. how would Starbucks approach the sneaker business?)
• Then, convergent exercises: Zero in on your top ideas. Think about whether the idea truly solves a need, is disruptive, feels future-proof, or even feasible and scalable, and narrow down.

Insider tip: Workshop in-person off-site if possible to avoid getting stuck in old thinking, and get into a new mindset. Bring in stimuli (real, physical products, from even beyond your category) to get people thinking.

 

Refinement

Once you have your top ideas from the workshop, share your product innovation ideas with your target audience to capture their feedback. To do this, you can field

• Live discussion or co-creation groups.
• Quick-turn quantitative survey with open ends.
• Qual at quant scale with a platform like Remesh.

The goal is to refine ideas (or, deprioritize them) before investing in full concept testing, so it’s alright for them to be a little rougher at this stage. A sentence with the benefit and some example features should do the trick!

Insider tip: Consider bringing your teams together with real people who represent your target, in a live session (no backroom)! Not only will you hear feedback straight from the source, you’ll also be able to iterate and co-create together. We promise they don’t bite.

 

Evaluation

Next, turn your ideas into full-fledged product concepts. These are descriptions that outline what the product is, who it’s for, the core benefit, plus key features and reasons to believe. These concepts also have 3D renderings that bring them to life. You can use a service like NielsenIQ BASES to evaluate which concepts have the greatest promise, and which may need refinement.

Insider tip: Simplify, simplify, simplify. The best concepts articulate benefits in clear, single-minded ways. One concept = one benefit!

 

Planning & Prototyping

Plan

Planning happens once you know which concepts have the greatest promise. Your plan is an outline of what you’ll need to do to bring this product to life.

• Part of your plan will be outlining how the product will be produced –from  sourcing materials to finding manufacturers, for instance.
• You will also need to develop a product marketing strategy, using your insights from earlier phases of research, coupled with data across your business – including how you will position, price and promote your product.

Prototype

Next, you’ll create a minimal viable product (MVP) that can be tested to ensure it works, and that it effectively solves people’s needs. The most important part – ensuring that it’s tested in real-world conditions. Making a shoe? Have people actually walk, run and jump in it at the gym.

Insider tip: Work in stages to get more specific feedback as you go, rather than general feedback toward the end (which can help avoid a lot of heartbreak, too!).

 

Development and Commercialization

Development

This is where the rubber meets the road – use insights from prototyping to make final tweaks to your product before it goes into production.

Commercialization

The final stage, where you introduce your products to the market. This is when you create marketing plans to drive awareness and interest– and ultimately motivate people to purchase your product!

Insider tip: Embrace feedback after launch. While this is the final stage, it’s only the beginning of the consumer’s journey, and they may have thoughts on how the next version could be even better. That’s a good thing, and critical to more people-centric product development.

 

 

If you can’t tell, we love this kind of stuff at The Sound. Developing new product innovations is a huge part of how brands connect with people – so it’s only natural that people are a part of the process, and understanding people is how we get to possibilities.

Ready to get started? Have questions?

We’re here to help.