Innovative Market Research

I recently attended OpenView Senior Adviser Luke Hohmann‘s Innovation Games ® class, where I was exposed to a whole new form of primary market research.

Innovation Games are carefully designed exercises that use collaboration, visuals, physical props, and facilitation to elicit feedback and creative insights from participants not typically captured by other market research.The feedback and insights can help drive competitive positioning, product road map, market segmentation, packaging, and messaging.

Having witnessed the games in action (at three expansion stage software companies in the OpenView Venture Partners investment portfolio), seen some of the results, and participated in them myself, here are my key take-aways for product teams:

• While a number of traditional market research tools are available (surveys, phone interviews, on-site visits, focus groups, user conferences), some of them are too expensive for smaller companies and they are all limited in terms of what useful information they can capture from their targets.
• The customer mind is complex and offers up different data on the same topic depending on how it is accessed. For instance, ask a customer the same question five different times about his pain points, and he may give 5 completely different answers, and none of them may reflect the key insights you need!This poses a dilemma for product managers trying to be customer-centric and innovative at the same time.
• Instead of limiting themselves to traditional market research, product managers need to explore new ways of getting the data they need from customers and prospects. Creativity needs to start with the research method. 
• Product managers need to consider research methods that:
  • Participants will want to engage with and will enjoy!
  • Engage the participant’s mind through senses and angles that traditional research does not!
  • Don’t have to be very expensive!
  • Will produce actionable data. 
• Innovation Games has shown the following factors are helpful in achieving insightful, actionable market research data: physical props (actual card board boxes, big poster paper, magazines, pictures, stickers, etc.), a safe, open, fun environment for collaboration with others, and scenarios asking people to imagine, prioritize, buy, draw, and sell while giving them tools to express themselves.

So the next time you’re organizing a user conference and are about to host another hour-long panel about your customer pain points or feedback on your product, consider having them design the ideal product for themselves on an actual box, run a mock auction of product features, and get creative!

If you’d like some ideas on getting started, check out the following resources:
http://innovationgames.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_game
http://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Games-Creating-Breakthrough-Collaborative/dp/0321437292