By participating in the Customer Needs Discovery & Innovation Congress, you will receive both methods and application case examples:

Application case examples

1. How Intel established a strong user-centered design & innovation competency; and how its user-centered methods are applied to inform technology innovation.

2. About Microsoft’s successes and best practices in driving “impactful ethnography” across a product division and how ethnography is effectively building bridges between executives and product teams, marketing and development, company and customer.

3. About Steelcase’s six-step development process and its resultant impact on product success rates, new market entrance and overall customer experience.

4. The critical steps that Sun Microsystems took to research, develop, engineer and market the SL8500 (currently, the leading enterprise-level automated tape library in the world); how customer needs research drove development decisions throughout the process.

5. How Boston Scientific systematically gathers, organizes and integrates customer input into its portfolio planning and innovation processes. 

6. How IBM mines unstructured customer data (i.e. customers that provide unsolicited feedback, customer information found on-line and customer data shared with your employee base) and leverages this data to better understand customer needs.

7. How in addition to the classic market research tools such as focus groups, interviews and surveys, BD’s product development team adopted voice of the customer tools associated with its Six Sigma product development process. 

8. How Mack Trucks measures customer loyalty at key touch points, uses a Digital Dashboard online reporting tool and has incorporated real-time feedback to redesign its customers’ experience.

9. How LEGO® engaged key core customers in a revolutionary users panel to create the next generation of its blockbuster Mindstorms® product.  How software hackers, engineers, teachers and hobbyists collaborated to improve the software; how LEGO® encouraged this interaction through online communities, global contests and more.

10. Hallmark’s successful use of proprietary on-line communities to create vibrant, constructive, productive, online dialog with consumers – how they turned this customer data into actionable new product concepts.

Methods

11. Methods of research including questionnaires, focus groups, web-based research, customer visits, ethnography, lead user, data mining, online communities, customer archetypes, more

12. Methods of analysis including Jonathan Cagan’s method of articulation and evaluation of value attributes, Value Opportunity Analysis to benchmark competition against product potential, and translation of value attributes

13. Methods of product definition including Tony Ulwick’s outcome-driven approach to reach consensus with your team on what an unmet customer need actually is and how to create a winning product, service and overall experience based on this knowledge.

14. Methods to drive concept generation, manage a product portfolio, and develop a new product strategy through identification of opportunity areas and Professor Jeremy Alexis’s needs clusters approach

15. Methods of translation, including to convert customer insights into a value proposition that addresses stakeholders’ personal commitment to a product or service

16. Methods of incorporating customer focus and customer experience in all operations. Christopher Meyer’s three kinds of customer monitoring: past patterns, present patterns, and potential patterns—who owns them and how they work together

17. Peter Marks’ Origins-of-Value matrix, which correlates financial goals (market size, market share, profit margins) with customer behaviors (interest, choice, and loyalty) and development stages (innovation, customerization, and optimization) to get the highest ROI from new and improved products