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.

​

design thinking.

​

ethnography

​

Kano methods

​

Lead user methods

 

For more on these and many other tools, click on the links below.