20 Oct Uncovering Opportunistic Insights That Can Lead to Innovation
Too many founders go through the motions of getting customer feedback; but they don’t know how to do it effectively. And they rarely know how to use the results to guide their actions towards better outcomes.
Here are several excerpts from an article by Sophie Allcock about how design research techniques can uncover powerful insights that can fuel strategic thinking and innovation.
The importance of the unknown
Innovation can, in many ways, be best fined as the process of uncovering opportunistic insights and then acting on them to gain competitive advantage.
The challenge for every organization is that their potential to innovate is bound up in uncovering these powerful (and often unexpected) insights – insights that can highlight hidden problems, identify new opportunities, or spark new ideas.
To innovate successfully, organizations need to uncover these unknown opportunities bound up in their customers. No insight, no innovation.
What is design research?
Design research takes a very different approach to traditional research programs. It typically involves target customers plus stakeholders and staff, because there is often incredibly valuable knowledge buried away in internal teams too. We engage people in conversations, form hypotheses, design potential outcomes and explore their impact with customers.
The aim is to get people to think differently by responding to new things, rather than by analyzing existing ones. The focus is on exploring the ideal future state, not auditing the current state. The process is fluid, iterative and built on interpretation rather than analysis.
Discussions are frequently allowed to stray off- topic (unsurprisingly, this is often where the most unexpected insights are uncovered). Engaging, informal discussions replace structured interviews – because who has ever behaved naturally in an interview? There are no statistics, no spreadsheets and no graphs.
Every organization needs to uncover the unknown opportunities bound up in its customers. Design research can generate remarkable insights that inspire innovation and drive future growth.
Imagine what you could do with all the things you don’t know.
Continue reading the complete source article.
With experience in agile marketing, lean canvas, growth hacking, digital marketing and CRM technology, Jim and his team at LaunchHawk Marketing offer a comprehensive range of consulting services designed specifically to help startups successfully scale their businesses.
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