Behind every innovative product idea is a golden nugget of customer insight. How do you prospect for the nugget, and more importantly, how do you get management to understand its value once you’ve unearthed it?

In a recent webinar, Darin Eich, PhD (the founder of innovationlearning.org) and I talked about five ways you can build your customers into the front end of innovation. As we delved into these methods (which I’ll detail in a bit), we discussed the types of golden insights you can generate.

But even if you strike it rich with these invaluable customer insights, how do you convince management to take action?

Five Ways to Pan for Golden Customer Insights

The golden insights are the actual things your customers say that bubble up in your research over and over again. These are comments that they’ll make, whether in written or verbal format, and you’ll see them emerge as recurring themes in the research.

During the webinar, Darin used his own research into innovation to provide an example.

He had conducted a series of interviews with a number of VP-level execs on how to drive innovation within their organization. Over and over again, he heard VPs refer to creating a “Culture of Innovation.”

A theme like this will emerge over time, as people tend to face the same challenges. “People are more similar than they are different,” Darin noted.

After hearing that theme consistently, Darin used it to spark an innovative, targeted idea. He built off their reactions to create an extensive training program on how to create a “Culture of Innovation.” 

Finding these golden nuggets before you really begin the innovation process is critical. The webinar touched on five methods to unearth these insights. (The percentages indicate how many webinar attendees used the respective method):

• Colleagues: Get input from colleagues, including customer services reps, salespeople - anyone who has contact with the customer (80%)
• Data Mining: Data mine, using forms on your website, surveys, emails and social media (64%)
• Applications: Use applications, such as online customer research platforms like Digsite (15%)
• Interviews: Conduct 1:1 interviews with current or potential customers (86%)
• Events: Hold events - such as hackathons or workshops, where you gather customers in the room (38%)

After using each of these methods, the golden nuggets can materialize in a variety of ways. As you aggregate the data into a spreadsheet format, look for the same verbiage that customers use over and over again. 

The spreadsheet below was automatically generated from a Digsite community. It includes comments from a community discussion about hardware tools, and we see mentions about how customers dislike the “awkwardness” of tools.  They liked it when the tool “molds to my hand.” Two customers mention how the tool feels in their hand.

You can use 1:1 interviews to generate those types of responses. But by using online applications like Digsite, in which we create online communities, you can also provide imagery to the group that generates a response, much like we do in a webinar when you conduct a poll.
 

Here you see some examples from customers -- things they liked, things they didn’t like (as denoted by the pluses and minuses). In this example, each of the pluses and minuses in the graphic include specific comments by the participants.

In this case, the verbatim quotes and the reactions to the visual should drive your product innovation. It doesn’t have to be literal - remember Henry Ford’s quote: “'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

These are inspirations for you to innovate - to find the creative solution.

How Do You Use the Golden Nuggest to Further Your Idea?

As we note in the conference, the themes that emerge should prompt the next step in innovation: Creating the innovative idea. How this happens is germane to your own operation, but at some point, you’ll create something new and amazing.

Once you’ve developed the BIG IDEA, it’s time to raise it up the flagpole and see how management reacts. Darin recommended a concept sheet to help not only present the idea, but also how it integrates with the company’s business plan.  The concept sheet should include:

1. The customer the product or service will serve
2. The description of the product or service and how it works
3. The problem it solves or opportunity it creates
4. The features and benefits
5. The validating evidence (culled from the Five Methods mentioned above)
6. The next steps for launch

Please note #5: The validating evidence. This refers to the golden insights that led to your innovation. This should include the actual quotes from the customers.

This is qualitative data, and your management team will likely request a quantification of the research - some sort of statistical validity that what you’re pursuing is actually what the market as a whole wants.

There are ways to triangulate this data, which Darin touches on in the webinar and we’ll pursue in greater detail in an upcoming post (subscribe to our blog to be kept in the loop).

These golden nuggets can also be used to formulate further quantitative research, which will satisfy the more numerically-inclined members of the management team.

One last note: When Darin conducted the survey of the research methodologies for unearthing the golden nugget, the use of applications like Digsite was low on the usage list for webinar attendees. At the end of the webinar, we were the second most preferred method on the list.

Why? Because it became apparent how invaluable these insights are to innovation, and how applications are providing more opportunities for customers to share their thoughts and feelings.

Learn more about how Digsite can fit your market research needs-download the Sprints Fact Sheet!