Six Ways To Innovate Your Innovation Process

Recently, I hosted a webinar during which I challenged everyone to innovate their innovation process. Below are highlights from the presentation which featured six things you can do to start innovating innovation today. At any time, I invite you to view the recording at your leisure.

1. Challenge Stage Gate

"The purpose of a decision is not to choose perfectly, but to get you to the next decision", Harvard Business Review September 27, 2013.

In my opinion, this is how we need to think when it comes to the innovation processes we are using: we need to make good decisions faster; not make perfect decisions.

Additionally, the current innovation timeline is too slow (approximately 2 years from idea to launch). We believe it's time to look across the process and the types of innovation in your portfolio, to line up the research effort with the type of innovation, the risk, and the investment.

For example, leveraging an emerging approach called Rapid In-Market Experimentation, or RIME, allows marketers to place their innovation in a test market, see what sticks, and then optimize on the fly. The goal is to scale fast, and fail fast.

2. Early Stage: Increased Focus

The fact is that the most successful innovations start with a strong insight. And getting the best insights starts by putting the consumer at the heart of the innovation process. But starting your innovation process in a room with only people from your own company makes the process too myopic and means that the consumer often gets lost in the process. If you put some rigor around the early stage, you will be able to put consumers at the core of the process, evaluate early, retain fundamental human insights, and focus on the drivers of successful innovations early and consistently.

3. Mobile: Faster, Better Insights

Honestly, adopting mobile research is one of the easiest ways to move faster. With real-time evaluation you're evaluating products where specific taste and scent attributes are strong drivers - things like saltiness, sweetness, aftertaste, etc. Consumers can much more accurately rate specific taste and scent attributes in the moment of use, rather than trying to recall their experience later on. Real-time also makes a difference when perceptions change depending on the usage occasion or how long the consumer uses the product.

4. Communities: Engagement & Speed

Engagement through communities is important, however, you can start slow with a pop-up community (4-6 weeks) to get a quick read. We have used pop-up communities to bring consumer language to life through video feedback, and to build foundational insights through discussions with community members. We have also created a community that clients can access for quick discussions, short polls, pack tests, co-creation. When you have a community of consumers who are engaged, they also want to be a part of making innovation.

5. Simulators: Real Time

Go beyond static information to real-time, dynamic tools like product testing simulators that help measure impact of modifications on consumer acceptance, or forecasting simulators to understand risk and sensitivity.

Forecasting Simulators let you play "what-if" scenarios with your marketing components (media spending, distribution, promotion and price), delivering real-time results whenever and wherever you need them.

Product Testing Simulators can be leveraged to estimate the impact of product modifications on consumer acceptance - again, in real-time.

6. Manage Your Innovation Portfolio

It's important to pinpoint the markets where you'll see greater potential. Recently, a multinational food company was considering innovating in five different categories and in four countries. The client had to pinpoint their best opportunities in terms of countries and categories. We estimated the sales potential in each country by looking at the size of the market and also the structure of each market in terms of:

Dominance: Market share of the market leader(s) Fragmentation: Number of brands / variants in the market Loyalty: Size of consumer repertoire

We did this very early on in their innovation process and did not use any consumer survey data. Our results showed that the US and UK had the most opportunities, with three of the categories meeting their threshold of 500 million euros. This exercise helped them jump start their innovation process and save a lot of time (and money).

Once you decide WHERE, you need to decide HOW to manage your innovation portfolio in order to balance risk and maximize ROI.

A great first step to achieving this is to Identify the Types of Innovations in Your Pipeline. Our unique Archetype system enables you to do just that, via an algorithm that essentially identifies a `product personality profile'. With this information, you can then answer 3 key questions:

Does your portfolio mix align with your strategy? Do you have enough breakthroughs? How can you maximize potential while managing risk?

There's not enough breakthrough innovation in CPG. Only about 5% of innovations are considered breakthrough, as proven via our Archetypes analysis and also quoted in the literature. And if you have a breakthrough you want to know it so you can treat it differently.

An excellent example is the work we did with a chocolate manufacturer. The client wanted to launch an innovative new chocolate candy that was low-fat but tasted exactly like a regular chocolate bar. They used our Archetype System to determine the type of innovation it was.

The client had a breakthrough innovation on their hands. Knowing that it was a breakthrough, and that consumers would need to be convinced that it actually tasted the same as regular chocolate, the client designed a marketing plan that involved heavy sampling to encourage trial and social media to increase positive word of mouth that the chocolate really tasted good.

Archetypes will force you to consider your brand strategy as well: You might find your innovation profiles as a certain type (e.g., me-too) when you intended otherwise (e.g., value) but you found your innovation was not differentiated enough. In fact, "Depends on Strategy" innovations make up a third of all of the innovations in our database.

To view the full presentation now, simply click here.