Do you remember getting new school supplies as a child at the start of each school year? The perfection of newly sharpened pencils with pristine erasers, the intoxicating smell of those fruit-scented markers, and the sharp crack of a hardback textbook’s spine the first time you opened it. Well, it’s back to school time and for most of us, those are fairly distant memories. However, dear reader, I believe we share a love of lifetime learning so here for your reading enjoyment is a list of books I recommend for insights on innovation. If you come across one that’s new to you and decide to read it, I hope you will find a bit of inspiration or a nugget of knowledge to apply in the year to come and beyond. 1. A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, Warren Berger: explore the art of questioning and its application for innovation. Berger provides some simple frameworks to successfully use questioning and interesting examples of innovators whose inquiries led to breakthroughs. 2. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries: the Lean Startup primer for anyone interested in entrepreneurship or innovation in general; somewhat technology industry focused, but principles are more broadly applicable. 3. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Ash Maurya: valuable for startups; he builds on concepts from other thinkers in space (e.g. Eric Ries and Steve Blank) but gives many more practical tips and real world examples for applying lean startup principles. 4. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman: a seminal work for anyone interested in why people do what they do. Fair warning, this one is long and a bit dry and academic in parts, but I think it’s still worth it for a deep and thorough understanding of System 1 vs. System 2 thinking. 5. Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results, Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg: I read this one as part of the Innovation & Design MOOC offered by University of Cincinnati, but the book stands alone as as instruction manual for creative brainstorming techniques that work. 6. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Tim Brown: Conceptual book about design thinking with lots of IDEO examples. This isn’t a “how to” book—there’s not a lot of practical application tips, but it does have great examples from a range of companies and is fun to read. 7. The Myths of Creativity: The Truth about How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, David Burkus: Insightful and inspiring book about creativity, useful for both individuals and entire organizations. Debunks common creativity myths and gives the message that everyone can be creative. 8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath and Dan Heath: a great idea is only great if you can get others to remember and act on it so this book gives lots of ways to make ideas “stickier” with lots of fun examples. 9. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink: I read this several years ago and I feel like I have already seen the trends shifting as he predicts and believe they will only accelerate as we continue to move from the “information” to the “conceptual” age. 10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini: This book is all about how to get people to say "yes". I actually read this book in college and still reference what I learned from it—it’s the essential guide to persuasion for marketers and market researchers. Bonus Reads: For My Fellow Researchers 11. Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, Sam Gosling: a psychologist’s take on what you can learn about people based on their stuff. It explores the connection between belongings and the “big five” personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeability, and Neuroticism). Great read for those who regularly conduct ethnographic/observational research. 12. Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich: I recommend this book for exercising your empathy muscle and getting a unique take on anthropological research. The author tells the story of her experiment to live on poverty-level wages for a time. While this book is not without detractors (namely that the experiment was conducted by an otherwise wealthy white woman who got to go back to her “real life”), I think it still paints a compelling portrait of a specific life experience. Did I miss one of your favorites? I’d love to get some of your top recommendations too so please leave a comment to this post with one of your favorite innovation titles. Note: I provided hyperlinks to each book on Amazon purely for convenience, but of course, I also recommend checking your local library or independent bookstore.
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I once worked in an organization headed by someone who wasn’t very supportive of what he called “general” consumer research—meaning research that wasn’t focused on optimizing a specific piece of execution or against a very precise business question. I agreed with him from the perspective of always needing clear research objectives and actions to be taken, but thought only doing research against specific products or projects was a bit short-sighted. He certainly wasn’t the only person in my career who preferred to turn to market research only to answer a specific project question, but that’s kind of like taking a single drinking glass to the well every time you’re thirsty. Before going further, let me take a minute to define “foundational research” so we’re all on the same page. The scope of foundational research is across an entire industry, market, category or consumer group(s) and includes understanding things like: habits & practices, unmet needs, attitudes, beliefs and values, category drivers and motivations, consumer segmentation and profiling, and more. And now, I would like to offer 3 arguments in support of investing resources against foundational research in your organization. 1. Foundational research is a well of information you can draw from over and over again. A robust category fundamentals study can yield myriad analyses and reports for multiple business objectives and if conducted on a semi-regular basis can replace many other, smaller studies. I was once part designing a comprehensive global skin care category fundamentals study, which was expensive and time consuming, but we put a rigorous analysis plan in place in advance to extract every drop of learning from that research. As a result, from a single study, we derived multiple high-impact business analyses across multiple segments and even developed a new global consumer framework that had huge strategic impact. We went back to that same study over and over again for specific project questions, ultimately saving both time and money. Qualitative foundational research can also be a “giving tree” of learning, especially when you use ethnographic techniques and storytelling. Specifically, doing in-context interviews with your target consumer segments and observing them performing a task and the environment it happens in or tell you a story about how an interaction with a product or service impacted her life. For example, two segments might say feeding their family healthy food is important, but one takes you to a farmer’s market on a shop-a-long and the other goes straight to the packaged food aisle in her local grocery store. Understanding those two definitions of “healthy” in a tangible way can lead to distinct insights for both groups. These are images, observations and stories you can go back to again and again when designing a new product or marketing campaign or trying to sell a project to upper management or investors. 2. Foundational research helps identify issues and opportunities and where to focus. By deeply understanding your customers and what’s most important to them, you can get ahead of possible pitfalls and beat competition to the punch. If you identify an issue or opportunity in foundational research, you know where to dive deeper. For example, foundational research might reveal a disconnect in what you think your brand stands for and how customers perceive it, which might lead to a dedicated brand re-positioning project or new advertising campaign to address. Quantitative foundational research in particular can provide a broad picture of your market/category landscape to help shape and prioritize future research plans. Early in my career, I was working on a declining category within beauty products and our charge was to figure out why and how to reverse the trend. We did extensive qualitative research and coupled that with data from existing quantitative research as well as in-market results (sales/shares) to define distinct market segments, each with its own targeted marketing strategy and recommended product innovation pipeline. This foundational learning allowed senior management to make strategic positioning and investment choices that not only reversed the decline, but actually turned the product segment into a growth engine for the brand within a very short period. 3. Foundational research helps you develop deeper understanding of your customers so you can create on their behalf. For me, one of the primary objectives of foundational research, especially qualitative, is to get to know your target customer so well that you actually develop a gut level feel for what will resonate with him or her. This is of course important for running a current business, but absolutely essential for future innovation. Steve Jobs famously remarked, “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” This, in a nutshell, is the objective of consumer research for innovation—not to ask customers what the answer is, but to deeply understand their needs, and empathize with them, so you can design a solution to delight them. If you take the time to lay a strong foundation of consumer understanding, it allows you to ultimately move faster by not having to research every small question along the way (ideally, the entire business core team would share in this learning to enable quicker consensus building). When I was working on an “aging in place” project focused on technology that would help keep seniors living independently longer, I had the opportunity to interview lots of seniors in their own homes, in community centers, and in assisted living facilities. We did talk specifically about health and technology, but just as importantly, I also got to hear their personal stories and understand what was most important to them in their lives. We talked spoke with formal and informal caregivers (family, neighbors, etc.) to get a more holistic picture of their needs from multiple perspectives. It was that foundational understanding that that helped us define the requirements of an ideal product/service and evaluate multiple potential technology platforms. Laying a strong foundation is the first step in any building project, including brands and companies. Investing in foundational research up front can provide a valuable resource for current and future business questions, a clear picture of the most important issues and opportunities to focus on, and a deep understanding of your customers so you can design to delight them. Translate Learning Into Insights With a Well-Planned Debrief Wait, isn’t this series about qualitative research? Debriefing isn’t really part of that, right? Wrong! By the “debrief”, I mean the time the team spends after the research discussing the learning together. This ranges from non-existent (on the client side) to a rushed 30 minutes of discussion before flights to (rarely) full day analysis sessions. You’ve just invested hours, if not days, observing and listening to consumers speak about your industry, category, products or services and, hopefully, how those things relate to their lives. Rushing out of your research without the due diligence of an in-depth debrief session with your team is like spending hours preparing a multi-course gourmet meal, taking a couple bites and then throwing the rest of it in the trash. It’s a huge waste! Qualitative research and the debrief session that follows should be planned in tandem—think about the outcome needed and work backwards to purposefully plan the exercises, discussions and experiences that will give you the raw input you need to put it all together afterwards. For example, ‘day in the life’ ethnography sessions might be translated into a single story or sample schedule for your target consumer. Or, metaphor elicitation done during a session can provide the input for creating archetypes in the analysis session after. It takes more time and discipline to plan this kind of research, but it’s difficult (if not impossible) to get the level of deep, actionable insights you need without it. It also has the very important benefit of deeper team engagement, which can bring diverse perspectives and help buy-in for the resulting conclusions and recommendations. How do you get maximum value from your research debrief? Using listening guides during the research and/or creating analysis templates in advance can be a big help. Consider learning processing activities like picture analysis (for consumer collages), mind-mapping, creating consumer hierarchies of need or other mental models. Listening is the easy part—putting it all together to actually extract the insights is hard work. An experienced moderator with strong facilitation skills can be invaluable for this. If it’s a multi-day project, build in time at the end of each day as well as at the conclusion of the project. As a rule of thumb, the more concrete and specific the research objective, the shorter the debrief and vice versa. For example, if you’re doing a handful of interviews to optimize a specific piece of creative with specifically defined learning objectives, you can probably complete the debrief in an hour or two. However, if you’re doing fundamental consumer or market segment understanding, gathering inspiration for future innovation, or doing in-depth ethnography, consider spending at least 50% (or maybe even up to 75%) of the time spent with consumers doing debriefing/analysis afterwards . Bottom line: to maximize value, qualitative research shouldn’t be considered over until all possible value has been extracted from the findings and applied to business challenges and opportunities via actionable conclusions and recommendations. |
AuthorSarah Faulkner, Owner Faulkner Insights Archives
July 2021
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