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Welcome to F-Stop
Faulkner Strategic Consulting's monthly eNewsletter
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This month's topic is the final in a series about Free Insights Sources for Innovation and focuses on Learning About New Ideas & Early Prototypes.
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Building on the previous months' understanding of a particular market, industry, and competition, we're now ready to look at ways to get quick learning on new ideas and early prototypes.
To start evaluating a new idea, feedback from others is critical. Think about expanding concentric circles, where first the feedback comes from colleagues or friends and then people with shared interests, followed by potential sellers and buyers—all of these interactions can be casual and conversational, just remember to stay in “information seeking” mode to maximize learning, don’t sell or defend the ideas to others.
- Internal/Team Research: share the idea or prototype with fellow employees who are not closely associated with the project. This can be as informal as walking around the office and talking to people at their desks or over coffee, or as formal as scheduled interviews or filling out surveys. This approach is particularly useful for larger companies and/or highly confidential projects without IP protection.
- Friends & Family Research: share the idea or prototype with friends and family and solicit their opinions, especially people who will be honest about their thoughts. If there’s a working prototype, it’s especially helpful to have friends try to use it in context and observe them.
- Local Meet-Up or Networking Groups: join a local group focused on entrepreneurship, design thinking, lean start-up or innovation and share ideas for feedback during scheduled times or in informal networking (search for a group on Meet-Up). If it’s a new company start-up or uses a new business model, consider using a Business Model Canvas to communicate the idea simply and solicit feedback.
- Talk to Potential Sellers: talk to store managers, salespeople and other selling professionals who might have experience with the product category or where the new product would potentially be sold. Do this informally and conversationally—reference their expertise and say their opinion would be really valuable.
- Talk to Potential Buyers: If there’s a specific early customer niche, is there a way to tap into potential local groups that meet the criteria? For example, if it’s a pet product, visit a the local dog park, pooch in tow, and chat with other owners or, if it’s a new video game, ask to talk to a local gamers’ club—most people are happy to give their opinion about something they really care about.
- Landing Pages & Crowd Funding: for certain ideas, trying to actual sell the product directly online (e.g. via Kickstarter or Indiegogo) can be a valuable learning experience. Never intentionally mislead people or take payment under false pretense, but by offering the chance to sign up to pre-order or for an email distribution update list, start-ups can begin to gauge interest before the product is ready to go. Create a custom landing page by using an intuitive website building site (e.g. Weebly or Wix), no coding necessary (minimal investment required to purchase a domain name if needed).
To wrap up this series, do-it-yourself, free market research can never completely take the place of well-designed, rigorously executed, and expertly analyzed customer and market research, particularly for higher-risk decisions and investments; however, in the early stages of market assessment and idea evaluation, it’s smart to take full advantage of the plethora of free resources available, including on-line information, publications, personal networks, and more.
Think about it as applying the Pareto Principle, or “80/20 Rule”, free market research won’t provide all the answers or maybe even the exact answers needed, but it may be enough to give the 80% needed just to get started, support a hunch, or take an idea to the next level.
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Thanks for reading this month's issue of F-Stop. Feedback is welcome and as always, please feel free to forward to friends and colleagues!
Sarah Faulkner
Principal, Faulkner Strategic Consulting
Faulkner Strategic Consulting guides companies with unique, meaningful and compelling insights that give direction to future innovation and help brands reach their full potential.
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Why F-Stop? In photography, F-Stop is a measure of lens speed which controls the brightness, or illuminance, of the scene. These concepts are central to innovation as well. The goal of F-Stop is to provide resources, information, and inspiration to illuminate and accelerate innovation.
For access to past issues of F-Stop or other publications, including the previous two in this series, please visit Faulkner Strategic Consulting's website.
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