Enhancing Consumer Performance in Idea Generation

It can be argued that there is a science to ideation and innovation; it’s not “strictly” about creative inspiration and throwing caution to the wind. More and more, companies in a variety of industries are looking to consumers for fresh ideas (i.e. My Starbucks Idea).

Columbia Business School’s Olivier Toubia and Marshall School of Business’ Lan Luo found that for effective consumer ideation, the research process cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. Their study, Fostering Consumer Performance in Idea Generation, offers research to help marketers and research and development teams to extract “better quality ideas from consumers and to identify their needs to inform new product and service development.”

Toubia and Luo write, “As firms… increasingly seek out consumers’ ideas in various domains, they will encounter individuals with different levels of domain-specific knowledge.” They segmented such individuals as low-knowledge and high-knowledge with regards to a particular area of interest. But with consumer segments at different ends of the knowledge spectrum come challenges in extracting insights. “The performance of low-knowledge consumers is likely to be hindered by their lack of relevant knowledge in the problem domain…,” note Toubia and Luo. “[High-knowledge] consumers often do not perform in accordance with their full potential (due to factors such as shallow processing and inattention).”

Despite the discrepancy in depth of knowledge, each segment provides valuable insights on said domain. The study examines the interplay and outlines a process for creating customized ways to mitigate such obstacles, so companies may experience enhanced consumer performance in idea generation. Further, their research explores ways to apply this customized task system to open innovation platforms conducted online, a practice many brands currently use.

Download Fostering Consumer Performance in Idea Generation to learn more about taking a strategic approach to consumer ideation.

BY ALLIE ABODEELY

A Culture of Experimentation: More Innovation, Less Spend

In the world of marketing, there’s not always one right answer. Kaaren Hanson, Vice President of Design Innovation for Intuit, has applied this thinking to product development at Intuit.

At last month’s BRITE ’13 conference, Hanson discussed how rapid experimentation enhanced Intuit’s product innovation process enabling them to find better solutions, cut costs and drive employee engagement. The focus at Intuit is no longer weighted on finding the correct answer, as traditional thinking dictates. “Often you spend time in a room discussing and debating that answer… there are so many politics,” explains Hanson. Instead, the folks at Intuit have shifted focus to what Hanson describes as a culture of experimentation.

Hanson elaborates, “There are many right answers with so many different possible right answers… it behooves those teams to come up with potentially varied solutions. And then rapidly experiment.” In this phase, Intuit places trust in the customer before launching the product. “Let the customer decide, through their behaviors, what works and what doesn’t…. We build the users up before we make the decision to actually build it out. ”

Cycle time is much shorter and total spend is much lower, enabling them to reallocate those savings to product development. “Our hit rate… from the old way to the new way is not necessarily significantly different.” Because the process now takes less time and money, Intuit runs 50 different ideas in the same amount of time and resources it used to take to run three.

To truly benefit from rapid experimentation, Hanson emphasizes the following:

• Fall in love with the problem, not the solution: having several solutions will enable more objective judgment.
• Scrappy doesn’t mean crappy: rapid prototypes must not sacrifice quality.
• Get started: to see results, start small and work up to developing a culture of rapid experimentation across the entire organization.

Watch Hanson’s talk at BRITE ’13 to learn more about Intuit’s implementation of rapid experimentation.

BY ALENA CHIANG AND ALLIE ABODEELY