Engaging customers early in innovations
Ultimately, it’s the benefit for the customer that drives the commercial value of an innovation. However, it’s so easy to forget this when being busy with planning, meeting, executing, innovating in a hectic corporate environment. Even with the best intentions.
A nice example I recall happened in the very innovative Middle East region.
- One of the topics for the Open Innovation Challenge was “ How can we increase meaningful engagement with customers (doctors) in between the quarterly visits of our representatives?”.
- Amongst many exciting ideas, we selected the one that proposed to provide each customer with a “button”. The purpose was to put this button on the customer’s desk and if the customer thought of a question for our representative, the customer just hit the button and there would be immediate phone contact with our representative. (Note that this happened before the launch of Amazon Echo).
- The winning external team, together with the company business team developed a rudimentary prototype and visited a few doctors to discuss the solution. They didn’t like it, mainly because they were concerned that every company would develop their own “button” and they’d end up with a button-covered-desk.
- During the discussions, several customers mentioned that they struggled to keep track of and plan for their attendance at Continuous Medical Education sessions: they need to attend a minimum number to remain qualified to practice medicine. This led the team to create a different, this time very successful innovation: an app that allows doctors to easily track their completed attendance, a calendar with upcoming events – and a way for the representative to engage with their customer through the app, e.g. by alerting their customers about upcoming sessions, based on the doctors interest or sponsored by the company.
Lesson learned: early engagement of customers is critical. A low cost prototype (MVP) can help to find out quickly and cheaply how customers feel about your innovation.
If the customers like it, great. If they like it a bit, maybe an iteration can create a better solution. If they don’t like it at all, look for another idea.
As Steve Jobs said:
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure there was a defined, specific, assumed “customer value” in each innovative idea. Then I encouraged and supported the innovator to get customer reactions to their idea as quickly as possible, before investing too much time and resources in their experiment.
More reading on this: Customer Needs Should Drive Innovation and 19 Types of Customer Needs
More of these blogs? Click here: Wim Vandenhouweele
Do you have a good example of engaging with customers to innovate? Please share below!