Managing Innovation

Market research toolkit
Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
But identifying market needs and converting them into opportunities for innovation requires a little more searching. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools which can help us with this task. For example:
Market segmentation, to find particular groups with the marketplace, who might have interesting needs
Customer personas, to help develop a profile of these people and help us target our innovations towards them
Voice of the Customer tools to help hear their voices and understand their needs in more detail
Net promoter score, a widely used tool to explore customer experience
Outcome driven innovation (jobs to be done approach)
empathic design, which add methods to help uncover hidden market needs that people perhaps can't articulate
conjoint analysis, a powerful tool to determine how people value different product or service attributes.
For more on these and many other tools, click on the links below.