Consider these best practices for recruiting customers for interviews: 1) Value representativeness over sample size. 2) Include respondents along the value chain. 3) Recruit some respondents with internal resources. 4) Use outside recruiting if you get stuck. 5) Get the sales team on board. 6) Use a script for recruiting calls. 7) Email an agenda. 8) Send respondent to www.haveyoubeendiscovered.com. 9) Start with a big list. ... Read More

Unless you deal with two growth problems, you'd better get used to mediocre organic growth: 1) You only “earned” a small part of your growth today; the rest is “inherited” and “market” growth. 2) If you and your competitors are all planning to growth faster than the market you serve, someone will be disappointed. ... Read More

Even if your Stage-Gate® reviews are highly evolved, I’ll bet they’re missing a critical element: I doubt they separate your projects’ Execution Quality and Opportunity Quality. In this issue, we’ll see why this is holding you back. We’ll also look at a brand-new release of Blueprinter® software that remedies this. Imagine you’ve got two project ... Read More

The “old way” of interviewing was to “validate” your idea with customers… but this leads to confirmation bias. With the “new way,” you focus on their needs and gain 5 benefits… 1) add new outcomes to your design, 2) eliminate costs for unimportant outcomes, 3) learn why they want outcomes (for better pricing), 4) engage them more, and 5) move faster. ... Read More

Quality guru Edwards Deming taught us that “94% of problems in business are systems driven and only 6% are people driven.” With the right systems, a company will grow and thrive. And few are more important than the “feedback loop.” Unfortunately, this term has been used so broadly that the original and powerful meaning has ... Read More

A market segment is a “cluster of customers with similar needs.” You should focus your innovation on individual market segments for optimal effectiveness and efficiency. Follow these four market segmentation “rules” for success. ... Read More

What is idea generation? Idea generation is the process of generating and selecting ideas to solve discrete problems. However, within the context of new product development, the goal of idea generation is to solve customer problems. After all, every new product begins as an idea. Therefore, if there’s an innovation job that we’d better do ... Read More