Strategies for Discovering Innovation Opportunities

One of the most difficult challenges for the R&D professional is to identify and uncover a new or emerging need.  A veteran product developer often reminded me that “we humans are coping animals.”  We put up with the way things are until we believe there is an alternative.  Without the belief that there is a better way, we simply cope.  This coping tendency makes it hard to discover new or emerging needs in the market.

How then can the R&D professional listen to customers or end-users who are not able to articulate their needs very well, if at all?  How can we listen for new and emerging needs when we are not certain that the end-user for tomorrow’s new product will be the same one as today's?

We have observed three strategies for listening to end-users who are not as “articulate” as we wish they would be.  The strategies are called ideation, foresight and insight.  All three strategies require R&D to invest time and effort up-front in the identification and understanding of opportunities before rushing to invent and develop solutions.  However, each strategy takes the R&D professional into a different set of activities and methods, each with its own inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Ideation Strategy

The ideation strategy relies heavily upon the generation of ideas.  Here product developers generate and develop new product concepts and use them as “hidden microphones” to listen for the symptoms of new and emerging needs of end-users.  These concepts are used to stimulate reactions from end-users or customers with the hope that new and emerging needs will be expressed.

One advantage of this strategy is that it uses common and accessible tools and techniques of market research (e.g., focus groups).  Having new concepts to test gives you more of a reason to talk to customers, and conversing with end-users within this context is familiar and safe.

One disadvantage of this strategy is that the generators of the concepts often become wed to their ideas, and so the concepts become the ends rather than the means of discovery.  Even when concepts are regarded as “listening probes,” R&D professionals often wonder whether potential areas of opportunity were missed because the concepts were so limited in scope.

Foresight Strategy

The foresight strategy uses trends to uncover new and emerging needs.  The rationale is that new and emerging needs come from new attitudes and behavior, which are derived from trends.  If you identify and understand a trend, you are in a better position to identify a new need.

Given the lead time it takes from concept to commercialization to develop a breakthrough new product or innovation, many try to uncover and anticipate new needs for enough in advance to have time to prepare.  The foresight strategy is attractive to many because even with mediocre marketing, you should be able to succeed if your new offerings are aligned with the momentum inherent in the path of development.

In practice though, we have seen a lot of R&D efforts become distracted with the identification and analysis of trends.  People often place too little emphasis on making creative and solid associations between the trends, their company’s core competencies and the new and emerging needs.  They often over-indulge (in time and dollars) on trend identification, while underestimating the importance of doing trend analysis from the perspective of their company’s unique technical and market strengths.  Therefore follow-through and internal integration efforts tend to fall short.

Insight Strategy

The insight strategy, the least understood but perhaps the most potent of the three strategies, uses in-depth interview and ethnographic methods of observation to discover new and emerging needs.  Carefully selected subjects – both existing customers as well as “leading edge” users and even non-users – are interviewed and observed in their “native” environments.  They are even invited into the interpretation of their own behavior and attitudes.  This is a good method for originating proprietary end-user insights – perspectives on the end-user that your competitor is not likely to see.

The insight strategy is not for the faint of heart.  It requires organizational patience, a long leash extended to those involved in the research, and a special tolerance for ambiguity, characteristics which are not often found inside our organizations.  While it takes patience and discipline, the payoffs can be quite large – total new “competitive spaces,” as 3M calls them, have been discovered with this strategy that have led to new categories of products.  The elusive “big idea” may result from this strategy more than any of the others.

Ultimately, each team will want to consider its own combination and variation of these three strategies.  Whichever strategy is taken, the identification of new and emerging needs is best done by R&D professionals intimately familiar with the technical capabilities of their company and with what is technically possible.  Surround technically-savvy R&D professionals with ideas, foresight and insight regarding existing and potential end-users, and watch them help the market find the words for needs that had previously remained silent or hidden.

Listening requires ears.  Hearing requires empathy, understanding and imagination.


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 1997. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Creating Future Options

Engineers and scientists are increasingly collaborating with their counterparts in marketing and operations to envision and prepare for their division’s or corporation’s future. Many of these planning efforts require both creative and analytical skills; and they frequently require the artful combination and integration of diverse facts, data, knowledge, common sense and imagination. In the context of these business planning efforts, research and development professionals often overlook the unique and useful point of view they can bring—a perspective that arises out of their unique functional responsibilities.

Creating future options for the business is a primary purpose for Research and Development. To fulfill their functional responsibilities, research and development professionals must spend considerable time thinking about future competitive conditions and possibilities. This requires a degree of competence in re-examining prevailing mental models about the current business and how they might change in the future. This competence brings a powerful and much needed perspective to multi-functional planning discussions. Seldom, however, do research and development professionals think about the mental models that are often unconsciously held—by themselves and others—about the future itself.

The fable of the six blind men and the elephant seems to fit as a description of how many management teams think about their collective future. The fable suggests that the future is like an elephant and each of us alone is like one of the blind men. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant and, based upon his touch (experience), describes the whole elephant differently. One describes the elephant as a snake, because he is touching the elephant’s trunk. Another depicts the elephant as a tree trunk, because he is touching one of its legs, and so on.

The parable suggests that as we think about the future, it may be appropriate to remember that, as individuals, each of us may have only a part of the truth. Each of us is limited by our own perspective, experience and understanding. Therefore, it is risky to envision and plan for the future with like-minded individuals. Rather it is prudent to engage in these planning efforts with others who think differently. Thus, envisioning and planning for a future different from today requires the coming together of diverse points of view. This demands not only creativity, humility and patience, but also an appreciation of how each of us may think differently about the future itself.

Several years ago I attended the World Future Society annual conference. It is a very interesting and diverse collection of individuals, all of whom share very little in common except for an interest in things “future.” Surrounded by all this diversity I noticed that people seem to implicitly and unconsciously carry one of three basic orientations toward the future.

Some approach the future as something to predict. These types assume that the future is written. Precision, facts, projections, econometric approaches and the like are most important to people who carry this orientation to the future. Time frames tend to be relatively short-term and more operational for those who carry view the future this way.

Others approach the future as a problem to solve. These types assume that the future is only partially written. For them, we still have at least some control over our destiny. But as time marches on, we lose that control every day. So the challenge is to solve the future problems today. By solving these types of problems today we can influence the direction of future. Time frames tend to be more mid-term and developmental for people who are of this type.

A third group seems to view the future as a blank sheet. These types assume that the future is what you make it—it’s an “open book.”  Frequently, those who take this view appear to be relatively unaffected by operating concerns, preferring instead to think of the possibilities of new technologies and emerging market potential. Time frames tend to be more long-term for those with this view of the future.

Each of these mental models about the future has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each carries some element of truth and appropriateness. The point is not to argue which view of the future is better, but to ensure that all three views are being used in a balanced fashion.

As research and development professionals are constantly creating options for the future of the business, many are well positioned to expose unconscious assumptions that are held, not only about the business, but about the future itself. And in so doing, they make the actions and understanding that result from the planning process more useful to the corporation or division.

As an old philosopher put it so well, “The future is never what it used to be.” 

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in June 1997. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.