LexisNexis Innovation & Customer Collaboration
As the Director of User Experience and Design I was responsible for building innovation programs and dreaming up ideas for new products. We accomplished this in two ways:
As the Director of User Experience and Design I was responsible for building innovation programs and dreaming up ideas for new products. We accomplished this in two ways:
1. Idea-based Innovation
2. Needs-based Innovation
An ideas-based approach to innovation is based on the premise that the key to successful innovation is to generate a large number of ideas, from which the most likely to fail will be filtered out. Through this process of filtration the relevant department will be left with a shortlist of ‘good’ ideas that it will begin to test and experiment with. However, this approach is inherently flawed according to Anthony Ulwick of Strategyn Inc, as the mathematical probability of someone coming up with an idea that satisfactorily addresses all the customers unmet needs is close to zero.
A needs-based approach attempts to understand the customers needs, and then figure out which are unmet and devise a concept that addresses those unmet needs. Using methods such as interviews, customer visits, focus groups and other research methods, firms attempt to understand the needs of the customer. Despite all the talk most people do not still understand how to measure unmet needs, or indeed what can be classified as an unmet need. Therefore some academics have gone on to state despite these efforts that innovation can only truly arise when companies address a firms latent or unarticulated needs.
My strategy to corporate innovation quickly became a blended method of using both idea-based and needs-based innovation in creative ways, often at the same time. What follows are videos that depict some of the successes of this innovation approach.
