20. Impact
measurement
#5
empathy
To develop relevant ideas and
concepts, companies need to identify
with and understand the context, the
emotions and the (unarticulated) needs
of their customers.
@TOMDERUYCK
26. I love discovering new neighborhoods in
my city. Now that I am a parent I am
rediscovering the city in a new way, but I
feel limited in my mobility. I wish their was
a quicker way to conquer the city together
with my baby.
Urban parents insight
@TOMDERUYCK
35. Impact
measurement
#5
incubation
As innovation is by nature an
iterative process, empathy and
diversity need to be an integral part
of the process, not just an ad hoc
intervention. Ideas shape in time,
so does collaboration.
@TOMDERUYCK
36. Ideas shape in time
NPD is an iterative process
@TOMDERUYCK
46. THANK YOU!
Tom De Ruyck
Managing Partner
Head of CCBs
Tom.DeRuyck@insites-consulting.com
@TomDeRuyck
Editor's Notes
Ashley: Hi everyone, welcome to this webinar on CO-CREATIVE INNOVATION, thanks for joining us!
Before we start, let’s see if you can recognize some of my favorite brands.
This graph on the most innovative companies in the world is by the Boston Consulting Group. Since 2005 BCG surveys thousands of senior-level executives and this graph shows the evolution of the 50 companies that were ranked as most innovative.
I would like you to focus on the steep yellow curve on the right, let’s isolate it.
Which company do you think this is?
It first popped up in the tanking last year on place 41 and this year it is featured on an impressive 7th place.
You can guess in the chatbox!
For the next brand, let’s take a look at the evolution of their store count since 2004. You only notice a slight dip in the 2009 recession. Since then, the company has quickly shifted his focused on increasing international store count to avoid the impact of local unfavourable economic conditions.
So which company do you think it is?
This example is in the hospitality industry. Here you see room count of the biggest hospitality companies. Intercontinental group for example took 65 years to provide 645.000 rooms.
But there’s one brand which only needed 4 years to top that and to revolutionize the hospitality industry…
Any clue?
Indeed, Airbnb! So far, about 20 million travellers has stayed in other peoples homes through Airbnb; 10 million in 2014 alone.
So some of my favorite brands are Tesla, Starbucks and Airbnb. But what can we learn from them? What do they have in common?
Well, looking at the results, they are jumping the curve and are coming up with radical new innovations.
How?
Well first of all, they are not only focused on their products, on features and improvements. They think about innovation more holistically; BEYOND THE PRODUCT. They do this by starting from a thorough understanding of customer needs and by creating emotional experiences.
One of the goals for Airbnb is to gain an offline presence as ubiquitous as its online presence, and launch new sharing-economy services down the road.
Last month, Airbnb released a glossy new print magazine called Pineapple. Thousands of free copies of Pineapple will be distributed to Airbnb hosts around the world as a conversation starter for travellers.
So Tesla, Starbucks and Airbnb are good at approaching innovation BEYOND the product. What else do they have in common?
Well they set up a platform for diversity, a kind of ‘innovation playground’ and they engage external stakeholders in these efforts.
But we also see this openness at Tesla. In June, Tesla CEO’s Elon Musk announced that Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who wants to use their technology.
This bold move comes from the objective to expand the market for electric vehicles, which will in turn benefit Tesla.
If you always do something the same way, you won’t get a different outcome. So we’re taking the unbeaten path and mixing up these principles.
Ashley will start by elaborating on ‘Empathy’
Our first principle is Empathy – what do we mean by this and how does it play such a key role in co-creative innovation?
Consumer empathy is not a new concept within marketing overall, however sometimes a topic of hot debate about how strongly we build successful ideas and innovations based on unmet consumer needs.
At recent WCF, we were struck by how many speakers from innovation and design consultancies (and not traditionally research focused) were singling out the need for consumer ‘empathy’ as a vital component in approaching innovation. The tide of opinion seems to be changing here.
At InSites we do believe that great innovations are built on the back of potent consumer insights.
We have devised our internal ‘recipe’ for a great consumer insight but essentially they are
Unmet needs that a customer/consumer is motivated to solve
Powerful insights are often ‘fresh’ in the sense that they articulate a truth that the consumer may not have concsiously recognised before, ‘thats something new/new situation you are telling me, but actually its very true and relevant to me’
Great insight s can unlock great innovation and business potential
A good insight can lead to disruptive product or service innovation. A good example here is Dyson, changing the business model within the vacuum cleaner industry. They always thought that people did not want to see the dirt or dust … but in fact the opposite was true. They found that consumers who are cleaning wanted to see the effect of their efforts. The success behind Dyson is not only that it is a vacuum cleaner without a dust bag. More importantly is that it has a transparent container to collect the dirt. This insight changed the vacuum cleaner industry.
Achieving consumer empathy to generate potent insights can be hard for several reasons
Let go of your own personal viewpoint on the world.
It is stronger than ourselves: we all suffer from a well-known effect in psychology, called the false consensus bias. We believe that everybody thinks like us and would make the same choices. In making decisions, we rely on ourselves as a consumer and start from our own vision of the world. On top, another pyschological bias being observational selection bias makes us find new evidence to support our own false beliefs. Recognize the fact that when you buy a new car and start seeing it everwhere? Or when you are pregnant you suddenly notice a lot of other pregnant women around you?
Remember you are NOT always your consumer.
Remote control example and technical teams
Case Study: Dorel
Achieving empathy and close consumer connection through immersion into young parents lives in a holistic way.
Online blog and discussion community.
Yielding key insights as a springboard for innovation
Quinny is all about pushing limits. Mobility challenges that parents face every day are a burden. To tackle these challenges, the Quinny longboardstroller takes a different approach to urban mobility. It gives the experience and freedom of riding a longboard and enables parents to travel faster than with a regular stroller – so they can explore more of the city together with their kids.
The Quinny longboardstroller is in the final stages of development and expected to launch in the next few months. Register to be the first one to find out when the Quinny longboardstroller will be available to order. Limited edition of 1000
Thanks Ashley! The second principle of co-creative innovation is DIVERSITY.
Diversity is crucial in gathering observations to enhance empathy, but also when taking insights further to ideas and concepts which is the core of this webinar.
The act of generating ideas is about connecting experiences and synthesizing new things. More is better. More diverse is better.
So when we start from an insight, we’re not looking for one idea. We’re looking for hundreds of ideas! And a strong insight has indeed the innovation potential to be a springboard to a multitude of ideas. And we need that multitude, because in idea generation, quantity comes from quality.
But why is that?
When we are coming up with new ideas, by ourselves, in a brainstorm and ideally by collaborating with customers and external parties, our ideas take on an M curve, kind of like the McDonalds logo. This cure features the volume of our ideas in time. So the challenge is to break through the first curve of existing solutions to reach new ideas where we are connecting the dots from a varied set of experiences. The more experience the better.
All new ideas are combinations of dots that already exist, but to connect these dots, it’s not enough to have an innovation team. Everybody in the organization should be part of innovation and it’s crucial to also bring in diversity from outside the organization.
That’s exactly what the Heineken Open Design Explorations is all about! We’ve been collaborating with Heineken in the past 3 editions of their ‘co-creative innovation playground’. The result of the latest edition was launched at the London Design festival 3 months ago; The Heineken Pop-up city lounge.
What characterized the Open Design Explorations projects is their speed. In just one year wo went from scouting consumers and designers, uncovering lounge insights, generating concepts and developing them into fully functioning nightlife spaces.
To leverage empathy and diversity, we need to connect all stakeholders involved, but not just during a one-day workshop.
To push through the McDonalds curve I’ve shown before, we need time to generate ideas and develop them into concepts together.
Akshay Kothari & Ankit Gupta are two graduates who were passionate by how people consume news and how new technology was influencing their behavior.
They developed an iPad application to take this to the next level, with incubation as a central theme in their development.
Kothari and Gupta could regularly been seen together at a local coffee shop revising code and handing an iPad to customers for their immediate feedback. That intense product development cycle proved invaluable.
They almost got kicked out of the coffee shop because the owners were upset that they were bothering their customers, but it was environment for them.
Some of you might know the application, it’s called ‘Pulse’.
After three years it was purchased by LinkedIn for $90 million.
So do you have to go sit in a coffee for the rest of your days.
This is how a tweedehands, a part of the eBay Classifieds group has launched their new revamped and responsive marketplace, which went live yesterday!
By connecting with visitors longer in time, they gathered insights on what to change, and started the development in iterative cycles allowing their group of advisors to play around with new versions in their natural context and co-create the ultimate product.
These advisors were even adding to the buzz when the new platform was launched!
The final principle of co-creative innovation we would like to discuss is that of assessment
I would like to cover 2 different angles in this section:
The steps or actions we take to getting an idea selected and an innovation brought into the market
How we assess an innovation once it is ‘out there’
As primarily a marketing research agency we are often seen as part of a process that can kill or stifle creativity in the innovation process.
However ‘Killing ideas is not in our genes’ – its about identifying the great ideas and then helping them reach up to their full potential. Enhance, not stiffle creativity
Its also about evaluating them in a ‘true and fair’ environment and more on that later
A topical discussion is the area of assessment of innovation concepts is about evaluating their potential in the right context.
The way we look at a paper concept behind a computer screen at night may radically differ to how we evaluate the same concept in the actual context or need/state that we are likely to consume it.
Here is a recent case for one of our clients Ferrero
The business background was a new innovation concept for Nutella brand involving a snacking product. The team at Ferrero wanted to make sure this concept was evaluated in a proper contextual setting to evaluate the true potential and develop the right communication strategy.
Evaluated ‘paper concept’ phase – adding context gives significantly higher appeal relevance and UBI
In home user test – positives and neutrals sent a product sample to use as they see fit in their lives. Reassessing the concept at the end of the in-home test showed the true potential of the product and the right context for its use.
In context measurement: higher scores (relevance, credibility and interest > logical)
So these 4 principles turn Innovation into Co-creative Innovation
To wrap up, let’s discuss how AirBnb is bringing this into action.
Assesment: Airbnb was started by 2 guys in San Fransisco who couldn’t afford to pay rent, so they turned their loft into a lodging space with 3 airbeds. They built up a simple website to get 3 renters. From testing the experience in the true context, they learned how to develop their business idea.
Empathy: In this business idea, empathy with contemporary travelers is crucial. They discovered that travelers had a need for a more personal and local hotel experience.
Diversity: Airbnb is built around this principles as users are adding value themseleves by posting their lodgings and commenting about their experience.
Incubation: by developing their community of airbnb hosts and guests, they continuously improve the travel experience, offline, online; there is no line.
