Combining the Techniques: Designing Breakthrough Products and Services

Abstract

We opened this book by commenting on the large number of new products and services that fail and we have stressed throughout that understanding customers’ hidden needs is essential to the successful development of breakthrough products. To identify hidden needs, innovative techniques for market research need to be combined with more traditional ones. Using a combination of techniques generates deeper insights and also allows the results to be triangulated (crosschecked). But recognizing hidden needs is only the first challenge; creative product and service concepts need to be developed that address the hidden needs. In this chapter we explain how to combine different market research techniques to gain deeper market insights and then we discuss how these insights can be used to design breakthrough products. The approach we will present is not theoretical; it is based on our experiences working with a number of leading organizations including Agilent Technologies and Bosch Packaging Technology in the manufacturing sector, and VirginMoney in the financial services sector.