Want a product development strategy that ensures your new products will consistently beat competitors’? Follow these three steps. The good news is your competitors are probably ignoring—or doing a sloppy job—of the first two. Better yet, we’ll present evidence these steps make a difference. We’ll close with several examples. You can think of product development ... Read More

Want to boost your new product success rate? This new research by The AIM Institute shows a surprisingly strong correlation between B2B VOC skills and higher new product success rates. For the first time ever, you can now see which of 12 B2B VOC skills have the greatest impact on B2B new product success. If ... Read More

How do you accelerate the organic growth of a business? And can you be confident your growth will outpace most competitors? For B2B businesses today—and the foreseeable future—the answer is yes. The steps you must take are surprisingly low-cost, simple, and ignored by most. To succeed, you need a new mindset, new capabilities, and new ... Read More

Why use quantitative questions for interviews, not just qualitative? Two reasons. First, qualitative interviews give you reams of customer quotes with no good way to prioritize customer needs. Sure, you could count the number of times customers cite a certain need, but frequency of remarks is a poor substitute for customer eagerness to improve. More ... Read More

New product innovation is a tough business. You don’t get to decide what customers want, or how fast your market grows, or if the laws of science permit a breakthrough product. But you can decide how much commercial risk you’d like to absorb… if you are a B2B supplier. This isn’t as true for B2C. ... Read More

In 1965, DuPont scientist Stephanie Kwolek synthesized the first Kevlar polymer, an amazing fiber with five times the strength of steel. DuPont invested several hundred million dollars to commercialize the technology for tire cords, with disappointing results. It would be another decade before the company found its first major market for this material: bullet-proof vests. ... Read More

You can triple profit growth by engaging customers in your innovation process. Do this by “moving up” in these 6 levels of customer engagement: 1) our conference rooms, 2) asking our experts, 3) customer survey, 4) qualitative VOC interviews, 5) quantitative VOC interviews, and 6) B2B-optimized VOC interviews. ... Read More