Appunti - Leadership and Innovation, prof. Buganza

OUR INNOVATION AREA IS REALITY!

User needs analysis will be fundamental in order to understand how to interact with customers and understand their needs. It is a synonymous to a user-centered approach to innovation. It is focused on analysing the current sociocultural context and on understanding what the consumer wants from the products/services he purchases: our market is people. We therefore need to know what they want, but asking them directly rarely works, because they often have no idea what they want until they've seen and experienced it. That means we need to get information about them indirectly, in particular, information about what they value. Rather than focus on products, we need to look at the wider context in which people use them. We need to contextualize the customer in the current setting. We just do not simply ask customers what they want, but try to extract that info with different techniques. It is hard to understand what customers have in mind because maybe.

• To better understand the current underlying context.
• To reduce the uncertainties inherent in the NPD (New Product Development) process.
• To better satisfy the explicit and latent needs of our consumer.
• To streamline and optimize the costs, duration and quality of the NPD.

allow to extract and understand which are the current needs.

• →Explicit needs: Are something that customers can tell us and we can extract them just by asking people. People can lie because maybe they have a different image in their mind that they would like to propose to the researcher or because they already have a mindset and they are stuck into it: when researchers ask them what they want, they will probably say what is already on the market.
• →Observable needs: We can understand them by watching the customers interact with the product.
• →Tacit needs: They are implicit in the mind of customers and they arise when they experience a product or service, interacting with it.
• →Latent needs: They are the hardest to find, because users are not aware that they have these "match" between their needs. They become aware of them when they see the product and find that people didn't know they had these dreams and aspirations and the product itself.

It is really important to understand what is the right sample to interact with and start with defining the sections of the questionnaire in order to:

• Make rational trade-offs between the length and necessity of various sections.
• Ensure all necessary information is collected.
• Eliminate redundancy in the questionnaire.
• Construct a smooth flow of responses throughout the questionnaire.
• Check ordering requirements.

Develop the questionnaire in order to maximize response rate and minimize information bias and pre-test the questionnaire with a sample group of experts. Conduct a pre-analysis to identify if the data gathering and data analysis can be conducted as defined in the design of the questionnaire and issue the questionnaire to the chosen samples.

It is important to highlight that if we rely on an interview, it is really hard to extract data that are reliable, because maybe the user thinks that everything is fine when it's actually not, so we need to be

careful. Sometimes it is better to make people directly interact with the objects and see how it goes.

EXAMPLE IDEO: it leveraged a lot on market analysis and developed a product service system, called Pill-pack, that delivers pills directly to your home. It was created for people that have some problems remembering which pills to take in which day. The idea came exactly from asking people about their problems and the kind of interaction with the product itself (how to open the blister and so on).

Focus group: It doesn't rely on quantitative data, but we interview people together in a specific setting. It aims to produce insights and we see the dynamics among people.

Despite this technique constitutes a notable improvement in comparison to the interviews, it introduces three strong limitations:

• The choice of the representative sample is very critical. We need to be thoughtful in selecting the target because we need them to interact among each other.
• The target

customers must be well defined and known.

• The observations happen in a controlled context that differs from the daily context of the single consumer.

The problem of asking people if they want a specific feature is that they do not have the mind in the specific context.

That's why interviews and focus group are generally used in the last parts of the innovation process context in order to gain some confirm about the idea that we've already had.

Prof. Tommaso Buganza Leadership and Innovation 2019/2020 MSc in Management Engineering POLIMI

03.2 Understanding User Needs: WHAT PEOPLE DO - Ethnographic research

The origins of ethnography are rooted in the fields of anthropology and sociology, based on naturalistic or participant observation or study of the native aspects of a culture (organizations, point-of-sales, schools, airports, households can and should be thought of as culture and as such, can be studied through ethnography). It was a technique used to understand

The Internet is a new qualitative research methodology that adapts ethnographic research techniques to study the cultures and communities that are emerging through computer-mediated communications. It was created by Kozinets and its first use was in the Star Trek community. They wanted to understand how Star Trek fans were interacting with merchandising. He studied what people were saying in the forums in order to understand their perception.

03.3 Understanding User Needs: WHAT PEOPLE MAKE EXAMPLE

The birth of (Burton) snowboard case study: it shows a specific kind of user that invented it because he had some specific needs. Snowboarding traces its history to the early 1960s, when a number of individuals developed an assortment of snowboard precursors, whose designs would ultimately give rise to the modern snowboard. In 1963, Tom Sims, an avid

Skier and skateboarder, made his first wood shop class. Sims and Bob Weber would go on to design snowboards and found the company known as Sims. Another very early developer was Sherman Poppen. In 1965, to make a toy for his daughter, he called a "snurfer." The toy turned out to be so popular that Poppen attached two skis together into what Poppen began organizing informal competitions for snurfer enthusiasts. Jake Burton Carpenter was one such enthusiast, and he began developing a version of the snurfer with rubber straps to act as bindings, giving the user greater control. This led to the founding of his Vermont-based company, Burton, which rose to become a dominant force in snowboarding.

Lead users Users that anticipate market needs and become active in fulfilling their own necessities. If we find them as a company, we are at a very good point because.