Life In The Fast Lane

This case study offers a timely (pun intended) example of how incorporating overnight idea testing yields the same number of validated concepts at a fraction of the time and cost. Now that's ROI.

In a world where speed to market may be the only remaining competitive advantage, Ideas*Overnight is helping our clients transform the way they approach new product innovation. Rather than moving slowly, testing a handful of concepts and waiting for weeks for results, Ideas*Overnight allows them to move with agility: testing a far greater number of ideas much faster, iterating, optimizing and retesting to identify and move only the best ideas forward. The following is a case study based on one of the clients who have partnered with us recently to leverage our overnight platform.

The Old School Approach

Our client was spending several hundred thousand dollars testing approximately 60 concepts across three waves per year (20 per wave). Including graphics and text and editing time, each of these concepts took about 10 hours to create, for a total of 600 hours spent in development. Once the concepts were created, it took approximately 4 weeks to field, analyze and deliver results - across 3 concept waves, this adds up to 12 weeks total time for testing. Here's the breakdown:

• 60 concepts tested
• $300,000 cost
• 600 hours concept development
• 12 weeks total testing time

On average, this client had a 20% pass-through rate for their concepts. This is a pretty typical rate for systems that do not vet their ideas prior to concept development. So at the end of one year, the old school approach yielded 12 validated concepts with the above costs.

A New Strategy Focus

When Ipsos launched Ideas*Overnight early this year, our client was intrigued with the potential and asked us to partner with them to develop a more agile approach to innovation. The first step was to validate for them that scores from an idea test would correlate with later concept scores. To do this, we took about a year's worth of concepts, brought them back to an idea-level stimulus, tested them via Ideas*Overnight and then correlated the idea scores with the concept scores. We found that that idea-level measures correlated between +0.6 to +0.7 with concept measures - a very strong relationship given the difference in stimuli. With the approach validated, we moved into full scale idea testing. Ideas are a lot easier to write than full concepts, taking only about 10 minutes each. The cost to test ideas is significantly less than concepts and, of course, the overnight platform makes timing much faster. Here's the breakdown in just three months of testing.

• Over 150 ideas tested
• $85,000 cost
• 25 hours ideas development
• 5 days total testing time

What's great about this is that each of the 5 waves of idea screening allowed our client to iterate on previously tested ideas as well as testing new ones, leveraging the feedback from the KPIs as well as Idea Evaluator (our highlighter tool) to optimize and retest the ideas. This ability to quickly iterate ultimately yielded powerful ideas that were ready to succeed in concept testing. Because of the iteration and optimization of the ideas, the entire system becomes much more efficient - with dramatically higher pass through rates at the concept phase.

Moving into the concept testing phase, only 20 concepts were tested as the idea testing identified these as having the highest potential out of over 100 novel ideas tested.

Project Comparison - At A Glance

The data are perfectly clear: incorporating overnight idea testing yielded the same number of validated concepts at a fraction of the time and cost. In a world where budgets are tighter and speed to market is essential, Ideas*Overnight delivered. What once took a year, now took just three months, and that means better products and services getting to market and appeasing consumer demand even faster. That's ROI. The age of agile market research is now.