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Three Methods To Make Development Insights Actionable

3 ways to maximize trend insights

Not so long ago it would have been strange for companies to send their employees into consumer homes to watch them use products and overcome challenges. Today, corporate anthropologists and ethnographers – researchers trained to observe people and cultures – are quite common, especially among consumer goods companies. The same companies that once led the way in popularizing ethnographic research – customer-centric leaders like P&G, Intel, Ford, and General Motors – are now bringing corporate futurists into the mainstream. Futurists are individuals whose job it is to observe and predict. You will research trends, talk to people from different backgrounds and examine how things are changing. They look well beyond their own industries to understand how economic, social, and technological forces affect consumer demand and will affect their businesses.

But are futurists really necessary? After all, companies have survived for so long without them. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more difficult for companies to bring new products to market. First, there is a growing need to be faster. Product development times can be long, especially for established companies. Ford’s in-house futurist once remarked that a brilliant new idea for a car could take three years to actually hit the road. At Intel, it can take five to ten years to manufacture a new chip. In the meantime, startups are working faster and the product areas are becoming increasingly dense. At the same time, there is an equally important need to get better. Consumer expectations of new products are rising, and industry disruptors are increasing stakes by offering on-demand services and products that are tailored to the individual. What we’ve seen is that companies are struggling to reach the bar that modern consumers have set. In a 2015 report, Nielsen found that out of more than 20,000 new product launches since 2008, there have only been 74 that were clear, persistent, and relevant enough to be classified as breakthrough innovations.

It is difficult to bring a successful new product to market and there is no way you want to place a big bet on an offer that is almost out of date by the time it enters the market. Why are so many companies firing their futurists so soon after they are hired? Because many companies work in isolation, there are often problems bridging the gap between customer insights and strategic planning. Given that futurists span the two arenas – without properly integrating into both – a number of organizations will struggle to make the futurists’ results actionable. We offer three strategies to ensure that your trending insights are not lost and that your futurists are still employed.

1. Create a common language that will be used across functions. One of the reasons for the insights versus strategy gap is that teams don’t use the same language in their day-to-day work. You will often hear insights or marketing teams talking about need states and customer segments. When you make your way to the strategy or commercialization teams, the conversation is completely different. When you bring it up, you may find that someone has a vague memory of seeing segmentation once, but the discussion instead revolves around leveraging competencies and projecting the size of the opportunity. Both sides generate a lot of meaningful results, but there is no cohesive flow to ensure that the final solution reflects the earliest insight and is best positioned to succeed in the marketplace.

“To Do” is a framework for bridging this gap. While different departments may have different goals and points to prove, a common language can be used across the company to improve the development process. The “jobs” and “job drivers” with which Customer Insights teams understand customer needs and how markets can be segmented can also form the basis for strategic discussions about market potential and the conversion of existing assets. While the framework is more nuanced than what we’re showing here, the underlying point is simple: when all departments use the same terminology, you create alignment that ultimately leads to more successful product launches.

2. Assign trends and opportunities to specific occasions. Another reason newly revealed trends are often ignored is that they have no direct bearing on the situations in which your products play a role. Sure, the Internet of Things (IoT) may be a major trend, but what does it matter if your company sells sponges? Actually, it can be very important. Let’s stick with the sponge example to illustrate the point. While you probably wouldn’t incorporate Wi-Fi capabilities into your sponges, you could see a scenario where connected home meters automatically alert consumers that their cleaning needs are piling up. Perhaps the type of cleaning required – antimicrobials, stain removal, etc. – could affect the categorization of sponges. This could have a huge impact on how you market and sell these sponges.

It is important that there is room for innovation beyond the product. Instead of making a better sponge or changing the way you sell your sponge, there may be other opportunities for growth. Perhaps the IoT trend offers the opportunity to proactively offer an on-demand cleaning service that responds to the warnings from the connected household meter. Even if you fail to create that new source of income, you can actually opt to partner with the hypothetical counter company as people use their sponges and other cleaning products more than usual – much like the Dollar Shave Club model is getting people to use their Replace razor blades more regularly.

Regardless of how you choose to respond to a trend or unsatisfied job that you discover, it’s important to put the opportunity in the right context. Futurists will necessarily bring in insights that are a little unknown. There will no doubt be people who say that these results are irrelevant to your industry or company. However, the futurists who best prepare their companies for what is to come will be the ones who map their insights into contexts, occasions, and customer types that are already on the company’s radar.

3. Create a process that ends in a transfer plan. While many companies invest in building some kind of innovation capability – be it a team of innovation champions or a stage-gate process to promote new ideas – only a few are characterized by developing a truly consistent program. In many cases the focus is on two relatively small areas: brainstorming and brainstorming. The types of innovation programs that lead to repeatable success are much broader. You create a step-by-step process to gather insights, develop and prioritize ideas, and create business cases for the most promising ideas. They provide tools to help potential innovators and they provide opportunities for everyone to develop their innovation skills.

In particular, the best innovation programs have one thing in common: They end in a transfer plan that allows an innovation project to be passed on to a commercialization team or an existing business unit. These plans include ensuring that recipients are invested in the success of the project, preferably by collecting their contributions and buy-in early. They provide the map that ensures the project remains appropriately staffed, funded and supported, and combat the “Not Made Up Here” mentality that so often kills good ideas. While it may seem like such a small part of innovation, a well-designed transfer plan is essential for good ideas to survive.

In the years to come, we will see that corporate futurists can add great value to businesses. As companies struggle to understand what the future will bring, trained futurists can provide important insights into how customers and industries are evolving. This not only gives companies an edge over their competitors, but also over competitors they don’t even know exist. But if companies don’t change the way they work, it is in vain to attract futurists. The futurists’ insights will be lost and their terms of office will be short. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Companies can introduce a common job language that allows knowledge to flow easily across departments. You can ensure that futurists map their findings to contexts that resonate with key stakeholders. And they can design a process that will protect emerging ideas as they move on to commercialization. With just a few simple steps, companies can ensure that the trends they uncover become promising innovations, not handouts for presentations that collect dust.

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, author of JOBS TO BE DONE: A Roadmap for Customer-Oriented Innovation together with David Farber.

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