Blog Category: New Product Blueprinting Process

What is New Product Blueprinting?

What is New Product Blueprinting

With New Product Blueprinting, you use creative foresight and a detailed plan for new product development… similar to an architect’s planning before breaking ground. The process includes 7 steps: 1) market research, 2) Discovery interviews, 3) Preference interviews, 4) side-by-side testing, 5) product objectives, 6) technical brainstorming, and 7) business case. ... Read More

Here’s how to weaponize customer insight for competitive advantage.

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Here is our #1 recommendation for innovation success: Don’t start development stage work without quantitative evidence of customer needs. You can use Preference interviews followed by Market Satisfaction Gaps… or some other unfiltered, unbiased evidence. Two tips: 1) Don’t do this for very small projects, just those requiring 1+ person-year of development. 2) Don’t do this for technology development. Just product development, where you’ve targeted a specific market segment.

More in article, Market Satisfaction Gaps… your key to B2B organic growth

Here’s what’s important to growth-seeking companies.

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Our research into the views of B2B professionals regarding organic growth revealed: The #1 driver of profitable, sustainable growth is strong value propositions. The #1 differentiator between strong and weak value providers is front-end work. The #1 most desired area to improve is market insight. See a pattern? Today’s key to growth isn’t an improved stage-and-gate process or hiring more R&D staff. It’s understanding customer needs better than competitors.

More in article, Market Satisfaction Gaps… your key to B2B organic growth

You can see surprising diversity with quantitative B2B market insight.

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We recently compiled a dozen short case stories of B2B clients doing impressive front-end work. (See www.aimcasestories.com.) What surprised us was how different each case was. The NPD project teams all used their quantitative Preference interviews to construct Market Satisfaction Gap profiles… and we were struck with how unique market segments can be. Truly, each one tells a story: Until you do quantitative interviews, though, that story goes untold.

More in article, Market Satisfaction Gaps… your key to B2B organic growth

What stops when you start requiring Market Satisfaction Gaps?

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Market Satisfaction Gaps (MSG) come from teams’ quantitative interviews, and are reliable evidence of which outcomes customer do—and do not—want “fixed.” When you require MSGs as the “admission ticket” for projects to enter the costly product development stage, 3 things go away: 1. Confusion (misunderstanding customer needs and their priorities), 2. Bias (altering customer needs to better fit our pre-conceived solutions), and 3. Filtering (cherry-picking customer needs to match those we hoped to hear.)

More in article, Market Satisfaction Gaps… your key to B2B organic growth

Some leaders could boost innovation by staying home

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We see three areas where leaders can have a greater negative impact on innovation than positive: 1) organizational friction (travel bans, spending freezes, hiring delays, excessive re-orgs, etc.) that slow innovation to a crawl, 2) spreading too few resources over too many projects so that nothing moves briskly, and 3) short-changing the front-end of innovation, so that a clear picture of customer needs is lacking. Companies pay a heavy price for keeping such leaders in place.

More in article, Accelerate New Product Innovation

10 Advantages of Blueprinter® Software

10 Advantages of Blueprinter 5.0

This cloud-based software provides 10 advantages: 1) enhanced data security, 2) better determination of who to interview, 3) better interview preparation, 4) reduced stress recruiting interviewees, 5) improved customer process map-building capability, 6) stronger interview beginning, 7) better outcome capture, 8) on-screen viewing of trigger map, 9) easier selection of Top Picks, and 10 anywhere-anytime access of project data. ... Read More

B2B Customer needs: From “guessing”… to “understanding”… to “modeling”.

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In B2B we can do even better than “understanding” customer needs. We can “model” them. Use customer interviews to understand customers’ key outcomes. But don’t stop there. Ask how they measure these outcomes… and how good is “good enough.” Then create a model so you can test how they’ll react to any product design you imagine.

More in article, B2B Customer Needs: Predict the customer’s experience with modeling

 

How is the modern B2B innovator like a weather forecaster?

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In both cases models are used to predict future behavior. Barometric pressure and other data are the “raw material” for weather models. For you, it’s quantitatively measuring key customer outcomes in the front-end of innovation. Your model lets you replicate the customer experience… so you can know with confidence how they’ll react to any of your product designs.

More in article, How to model customer needs (Originally published in B2B Organic Growth newsletter).

Skip quantitative interviews if you’ve got extra R&D resources to squander.

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After qualitative interviews, seek customer ratings on key outcomes: “How important is abrasion resistance on a 1-10 scale? And how satisfied are you today with abrasion resistance on a 1-10 scale?” This lets you converge with confidence on only those outcomes customers care about… those with Market Satisfaction Gaps over 30% (important and unsatisfied).

More in white paper, Catch the Innovation Wave (page 11).