Trends and developments offer opportunities. Opportunities for innovation. You see it happening around you. You also have an idea of how you want to incorporate these opportunities into a new product. It’s a start! But how do you increase the chance of success? And how do you prevent making a lot of preliminary investments in a product that ultimately yields too little? In short, where do you start? Is there a right approach?
The biggest obstacle in innovation
It’s you! Of course you’re enthusiastic about your own idea. But is your customer too? Start testing your ideas. Let yourself be surprised by other angles and reactions from your target group. This takes time and is even a bit exciting. Imagine that the idea isn’t that good after all. What if people don’t want to pay for it, or don’t experience the problem you solve? It happens more often than you think. Research shows that only 28% (Simon Kucher & Partners, 2014) of new ideas meet the needs and expectations of the target group. And that is precisely why it is so important to invest time in researching and testing your idea before investing money.
The four steps of product development
The path from idea to launch can be divided into 2 phases with 4 steps. Of which the first three steps (the research phase) are decisive for the successful execution of the fourth step (the execution phase). We distinguish between the following four steps:
Understanding
In the first phase, the basic attitude is, you guessed it, research. Apart from your first idea, you immerse yourself in the world of your potential target groups. What do they want to achieve? What pain points and needs do they have? Where are the opportunities to really make an impact for your target group? With the help of interviews, existing market research, follow-along or participating research and co-creation, you gain an increasingly richer understanding of your target group.
Creating
At a certain point, recognizable patterns emerge in the image of the target group. The moment to determine whether your initial idea still fits or whether there are still new variations to come up with. The fun thing about this phase is that you are going to create as many ideas and solutions as possible. Ultimately, the choice falls on the idea that best matches the demand and needs of your target group.
Testing
Now it is time to test the most valuable idea. Be careful with making large investments. Test the ideas you have simply and small, so that you do not incur too many costs. Choose a quick prototype of your product such as a drawing or visual. With the first feedback you can test your assumptions and make improvements. The more assumptions you have tested, the more certain you can say that your idea will work. When you can prove on the basis of the test that your idea solves a problem, that the customer is willing to pay for it and that the idea is feasible… then it is time to move on to the implementation.
Launching
In this phase too, many things are still unclear, but the most critical assumptions of your idea have been tested. So now you can take a bit more risk and make some investments. You start with a first real version of the product, the first sales and the official launch!
By sticking to this order and method you prevent large investments that later turn out to be bad. It provides stability in an uncertain time of product or service development. Read more on our innovate using design thinking approach.
