Turn Customer Input into Innovation

It's difficult to find a company these days that doesn't strive to be customer driven. Too bad, then, that most companies go about the process of listening to customers all wrong. What usually happens is this: Companies ask their customers what they want. Customers offer solutions in the form of products or services. Companies then deliver these tangibles, and customers just don't buy. The reason is simple--customers aren't expert or informed enough to come up with solutions. That's what your R&D team is for. Rather, customers should be asked only for outcomes--what they want a new product or service to do for them. The form the solutions take should be up to you. Using Cordis Corp. as an example, this article describes a series of effective steps for capturing, analyzing, and utilizing customer input. First come in-depth interviews, in which a moderator works with customers to deconstruct a process or activity to unearth "desired outcomes." Researchers then compile a comprehensive list of outcomes that participants rank in order of importance and degree to which they are satisfied by existing products. Finally, using a simple mathematical formula called the "opportunity calculation," researchers can learn the relative attractiveness of key opportunity areas. These data can be used to uncover opportunities for product development, to segment markets properly, and to conduct competitive analysis.

• Decision making
• Innovation
• Corporate strategy
• R&D
• Market research