however, the method is definitely recommended!
2. Customer visit teams:
With this approach, visit teams
(cross-functional, typically three people) visit your customers or
users; they use in-depth interviews based on a carefully-crafted
interview guide to uncover user problems, needs, and wants for
new products. The method is ranked #4 in popularity with 30.6
percent of firms extensively using this method. It is ranked #2 by
users for effectiveness (a strong 6.6 rating out of 10). The major
advantages users claim are the ability to identify and focus on
customer problems and unspoken needs during these interview
sessions, a vital source of product ideas. The main challenges
are getting customers to cooperate (to agree to the session and
to provide honest answers), finding the time to do this valuable
study (in-depth interviews at multiple customer sites do take more
effort than most of the methods), training the interviewers, and
designing a robust interview guide with the right questions. In
spite of the challenges, however, this VOC visit team method is
definitely recommended!
3. Customer focus groups for problem detection:
In this VOC
method, focus groups are run with your customers or users to
identify needs, wants, problems, points of pain, and new product
suggestions. (Note that in product development, focus groups are most often used to test
concepts, not to generate
ideas.) The focus group
moderator skillfully fo-
cuses the discussion on
problems or wants and
helps users walk through
their problems.
There is a lack of
substantial research to
reveal the most effective
idea sources.
The method is ranked
#5 in popularity, with 25.5 percent of firms extensively using
focus groups for problem identification and ideation. Its effective-
ness is ranked #3 by users, with a positive effectiveness score of
6.4 out of 10. The method shares the same strengths as the visit
team approach above, namely the ability to identify problems
and to drill down into these problems. Challenges include get-
ting the right customers to agree to participate (a
particular problem with
business-to-business or
B2B customers), finding
the right moderator with
focus group skills and prod-
uct knowledge, and cost.
This method is definitely
recommended!
4. Lead user analysis:
This VOC method, pio-
neered by Eric von Hippel,
has been around since the
1980s, but has caught on
only in the last decade.
4
The
theory is that if one works
with innovative customers,
then innovative product
ideas are the result. The
technique often entails as-
sembling a group of partic-
ularly innovative customers or users (a group workshop) to identify problems and potential
solutions. The method is positioned very close to #3, customer
focus groups, in the magic ideation quadrant diagram; and it proves
to be quite popular, with 24.0 percent of firms extensively using
the approach. The method is thought to be effective, too, ranked
#4 on average by users, with a positive effectiveness score of 6.4
out of 10. This method is definitely recommended.
The advantage of lead user analysis is that innovative customers,
who are ahead of the wave, are hence quite likely to have your next
new product idea; and this method is how you can uncover what
it is. And the method works: For example, some businesses at 3M
swear by the approach. Others are more neutral in their assessment.
The major challenges are identifying who the innovative customers
are, getting them to participate in an off-site workshop, and then
structuring and running the workshop session properly.
5. The customer or user designs:
This novel method has re-
ceived much attention in recent years, and it has been made pos-
sible in part because of new information technology (IT) tools.
5
Here, customers or users are invited to help you design your next
new product. For example, an article by Stephan Thomke and von
Hippel reports that:
Bush Boake Allen (BBA), a global supplier of specialty fla-
vors to companies like Nestle, has built a tool kit that enables
its customers to develop their own flavors, which BBA then
manufactures. In the materials field, GE provides customers
with Web-based tools for designing better plastic products. In
software, a number of companies let users add custom-designed
modules to their standard products and then commercialize the
best of those components.
6
The method has not caught on widely, however, with an overall
popularity ranking of #11 (only 17.4 percent of firms extensively
use the approach). In spite of its limited popularity, however, it
ranks #5 in terms of effectiveness, with a positive score of 6.0 out
of 10 and above the average rating for the 18 methods. The big
plus of this method is that informed users are in the best position