The Process For Standout Product Innovation

What's the actual process for coming up with a standout product innovation?

One that meaningfully differentiates your product from your competitors by creating a better experience for your consumers.

The short answer is insights.

Do all that you can within your timeline and budget to get a true picture (one from observation, not your imagination) of your consumer's experience, frustrations, and aspirations. Then, study the competitive landscape for gaps. From there, draw insights from your findings to identify the opportunities for a standout product innovation.

Maybe it would be helpful to know the actual steps we'd take, so here they are pulled from a recent project proposal of Knack's:

🔎 PHASE 1 // BENCHMARK OUR CONSUMER, PRODUCT, AND COMPETITION

Step 1. Study our consumer’s product experience, pain points, and aspirations

• Observe our consumers using our current product in their environment

• Use interviews, reviews, and secondary research to understand what our consumer values

• Collect information, observations, and ideas from the team's experience

Step 2. Study today’s competitive product landscape

• Use competitor products ourselves to get familiar with the experience they offer

• Observe our consumers using and comparing the competitor products

• Use sales data, store visits, and online marketplaces to understand the landscape

• Collect information, observations, and ideas from the team's experience

Step 3. Make sense of the data collected

• Organize and distill all of the information, observations, and ideas collected

• Visually summarize the findings to review, discuss, and refine with the team

Phase 1 establishes our selection criteria for determining what the right innovation opportunities are in Phase 2

🧠 PHASE 2 // IDENTIFY THE RIGHT INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES

Step 4. Draw insights and identify innovation opportunities from the findings

• Synthesize the data and findings from Phase 1

• Draw insights and identify innovation opportunities

• Review the insights and innovation opportunities as a team to discuss and refine

Step 5. Select which innovation opportunities to pursue

• Establish selection criteria

• As a team, use selection criteria to choose which innovation opportunities to pursue through concept visualizations

👀 PHASE 3 // VISUALIZE CONCEPTS THAT SEIZE THE CHOSEN OPPORTUNITIES

Step 6. Craft design strategies

• Craft design strategies based upon the innovation opportunity(s) selected

• Review the design strategies as a team to downselect and refine the design strategies to move forward with

Step 7. Ideate potential solutions

• Ideate a range of possible product innovations based on the design strategies

• Review the innovation ideas as a team and select which directions to develop into the initial product concepts

Step 8. Visualize the concepts

• Generate and visualize a range of product concepts to capture the innovation’s big idea and consumer experience of each concept

• Review and discuss the visualized product concepts to downselect and develop

The activities can change depending on your specific project objectives and available resources, but the strategy for coming up with a standout product innovation stays the same: draw insights (from observation, not your imagination).

Got questions? Ask away!

Knack is the industrial design studio that packs pipelines with value-creating innovations.

We do so by supporting product innovation teams with new product concept creation & illustration.