Innovate or die.

I suspect many of us have heard that quote, usually attributed to Peter Drucker.

The goal of innovation is to create products or services that have original value, perhaps in response to changing industries or solving impeding social, health, or economic challenges. With an effective strategy for bringing about that innovation, your brand can achieve real change and growth. Without an innovation strategy, well, your brand could simply wither away and disappear.

Benefits of Innovation

Is it worth the financial burden to take time away from day-to-day production to focus on innovation? Given the following benefits, successful marketing and business leaders would say yes.

• Remain relevant. In a world that’s constantly evolving culturally, economically, and politically, innovation helps brands remain relevant to people of today, not ten or fifty years ago when the brand was first launched. For example, today, brands take care to understand that gender is a social construct, not a precise measurement that dictates women use pink razors and men use black razors. And, remaining relevant means we work to understand changing consumer perceptions towards online ordering, something that really picked up over the last three years.
• Develop new products. For creative minds, one of the key benefits of innovation is creating brand new products like pet food made from insect protein. Perhaps you’ve discovered a new pain point, audience segment, journey, or channel that warrants building a for-purpose product. Even better, starting from scratch means you can build in privacy, accessibility, sustainability, and many other core features right from the beginning rather than trying to hack them in at a later date.
• Improve your existing products. Innovation is not just about creating new products. It’s also about improving the efficacy of existing products and appealing to new target audiences with those existing products. Growth comes from creating a more valuable product for your existing customers, and new value for new customers.
• Optimize your costs. Innovation can also take place in systems and processes. New methods of building a product, delivering a service, or running operations can speed things up or make them less expensive. For example, we now have the option to use automated signature tools rather than physically mailing or even emailing business contracts.

Of course, all of these benefits contribute to the growth and expansion of the business with new or more desirable revenue streams.

Benefits of an Innovation Strategy

Innovating alone is insufficient to maintain growth. Creating an effective strategy to bring those innovations to life is essential for preparing for long-term unanticipated lows and desirable highs. There are other benefits as well.

• Align everyone to the same goals. Creating an innovation strategy helps ensure efforts in all departments and groups are in keeping with the mission and vision of your business. When everyone has the same understanding of how innovation fits into the business growth strategy, every department can aim for the same, overarching goals rather than pursuing unrelated and unfocused individual goals.
• Focus resources. When everyone is aligned to the same goals, company resources, whether financial, personnel, or otherwise will be used much more wisely. Less waste, less distraction, and more energy spent in the right places.
• No resting on laurels. It’s easy to recall the good old days when you accomplished that awesome ‘thing.’ But 5 years ago is ancient in today’s world. Hundreds of new products and companies have since been launched, all of which have the potential to knock your brand out of the top 10 or top 1000 spot. You need to keep on proving that you deserve to be in the top 10 spot or someone else will. Without a strategy to stay there…. you won’t.

What Does a Successful Innovation Strategy Look Like

Though every company has a unique innovation strategy, successful strategies share a number of key characteristics.

• Continuous rather than ad hoc. Rather than developing innovations in response to external events, successful strategies have a goal of continuous improvement. Time and funds for innovation are built into every process. It’s expected at every stage from every person.
• Calculated risks. Playing it safe is rarely a good attribute of successful strategies. Be prepared to take risks along the way. Stretch your ideas just out of bounds to see what could be. Iterate, test, repeat.
• Embrace failure. Successful innovation strategies embrace every small and large failure that inevitably happens along the way, recognizing that each one is a learning opportunity. Learn from each challenge and put processes into place to ensure those mistakes can’t happen again. Seek out and embrace criticisms and challenges. Caught early, resolving small challenges will prevent massive mistakes.
• Measure the efforts. Successful strategies keep count. Count the failures, the successes, the ideas, the launches. Set fair expectations for both contributors and the leadership team around those metrics so everyone can monitor growth.
• Create and stick to timelines. Create fair timelines and stick to them. Time spent on innovations that get repeatedly delayed and never become reality are a waste of everyone’s time.
• Get stakeholder buy-in. Rather than waiting until an innovation is ready to launch, successful innovation strategies get buy-in from the leadership team from day one to ensure those innovations are in keeping with the long-term goals of the company. Without early buy-in and ongoing progress reports, those efforts could be completely wasted.

What’s Next?

Are you ready to get creative and put innovation at the top of your strategic plan? Our expert team is ready to help you gain new insights about your buyers, brands, and business that will support your next big innovation! Email your project specifications to our research experts using Projects at E2Eresearch dot com. We’d love to help you turn your enigmas into enlightenment!

Podcasts You Might Like

• How I Built This with Guy Raz
• Women in Innovation podcast
• What is Innovation with Jared Simmons
• Moonshoots Podcast: Learning Out Loud with Mike Parsons & Mark Pearson Freeland

Books You Might Like

• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christenson
• 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization by Vijay Kumar
• Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, and Ryan Pikkel.

Learn more from our case studies

• Identifying An Optimal Set of Flavor Variants to Achieve Incremental Reach | case study
• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format – A survey case study
• Monitoring Blockchain Adoption Over Time | A survey case study
• Stretching Brand Equity into White Spaces Using Data Fusion – A pharmaceutical data analytics case study

Learn more from our other blog posts

• Getting started with consumer, customer, and market segmentation
• How to conduct a journey mapping research project
• Journey Mapping from Enigma to Enlightenment: An E2E Research Webinar

Collision 2021 was a four-day, North American tech conference that drew more than 38 000 attendees. I was fortunate to be one of those attendees this year thanks to a ticket kindly donated by ESOMAR. This year, the Collision Conference hosted more than 600 speakers from all walks of life. Just a few of those people included:

• Celebrities: Cindy Crawford, Meaningful Beauty; Maria Sharapova, Therbody; Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures; Ryan Reynolds, Mint Mobile
• CEOs and CMOs from global companies: Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto; Ukonwa Ojo, Amazon; Fiona Carter, Goldman Sachs; Martin Wildberger, Royal Bank of Canada
• Local and global community leaders: Jagmeet Singh, Leader of Canadian New Democrat Party; John Tory, Mayor of Toronto; Katie Porter, Representative at US House of Representatives; Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago
• And 13-year-old whiz kids whose expertise and speaking skills rivaled the most experienced speakers in attendance!

With hundreds of sessions running simultaneously (and literally colliding with each other!), it was easy to create a personalized stream of content, particularly since no matter the time, a great talk was always just beginning. The stream I created for myself focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, and innovation. Here are the key themes I took away.

Technology Leaders Must Prove Their Trust

People love their devices. We trust them to help us discover and buy products, make and take phone calls and text messages from our loved ones, and remind us about confidential meetings and doctor’s appointments. We trust our devices will work as expected when we need them to work. However, there is a trust problem and it doesn’t lie with the technology itself. It lies in the fact that we don’t trust the people behind our devices, neither the people building the devices nor our government leaders, to create and hold appropriate boundaries around privacy and security.

Companies build trust by having clear values and a clear mission grounded in being authentic, empathetic, transparent, and relatable. We learn to trust companies that shape our experiences in ways that are personalized but at the same time not creepy. We also learn who trust by witnessing which companies hold themselves fully and immediately accountable when they make mistakes. Companies that abuse these expectations will quickly find themselves speaking to a declining audience. A great way to think about trust is that every interaction a company has with a consumer is either a deposit or a withdrawal. You do good or you do bad. There is no neutral.

Robot, Cobots, and the Inevitable

Did you realize you already have robots in your home? If we follow the strict definition that any automatically operated machine that replaces people is a robot, then your electric toothbrush, your toaster, and your vacuum cleaner (even if it’s NOT a Roomba) are robots. We’re slowly getting used to the idea that robots don’t have to take a human shape to be called robots.

A newer take on robots is the idea of cobots. Unlike a lot of robots that run behind the scenes, collaborative robots are designed to interact directly with or next to people. While you may be nervous that robots or cobots will take your job, there are many good reasons to be excited about working with them. Not only do they easily take on jobs that are dull, dirty, and dangerous, they augment our skills and abilities and help us do our work better and with more agility. Robots make us physically stronger and mentally more agile. If we let them, they help us make truly better decisions.

As in the case of robots and cobots, if something is inevitable, get enthusiastic about it.

The Language of AI

One of the main complaints about artificial intelligence comes when it’s used as a substitute for people. For instance, researchers are actively working on building AI tools intended to serve as personal companions for people who are elderly or disabled, and counsellors for people who’ve experienced trauma. Isn’t that impersonal? Isn’t that disrespectful? Well, let’s consider it from a different angle.

Think about people who’ve experienced a life of trauma, a life wrecked by abuse, trafficking, trauma, or addiction. A life where people have repeatedly let them down and shown that they can’t be trusted. Those who’ve experienced trauma may find it particularly hard to trust new people and may be far more comfortable beginning their healing process by working with AI.

Think about people who have experienced a brain injury or deal with communication disabilities. Or people who aren’t using their native language. Or people who feel more comfortable communicating via email or text. We constantly hear that people should be treated in the way they want and prefer to be treated. That we need to increase accessibility. This could easily be AI.

Regardless of the initial need, we need to ensure that these AI communication tools demonstrate empathy and show respect. AI can’t replace human judgement but it can and should reflect good judgement.

What Does It Mean For Researchers

The research industry talks about trust all the time. We need research participants to trust us enough to share their most personal opinions, their most private click-paths, and their most unusual purchase behaviours. We need research tools that can effectively automate dull and error-prone research tasks leaving us with more time to do our jobs even better and make better decisions.

And we really need to focus on language. So much of our work revolves around language – writing questionnaires with respectful wording that everyone can understand, moderating focus groups that accommodate every participant, making the research space accessible to all.

I may not have attended a single market research talk but I did indeed come away with new perspectives that will make me rethink how I have conducted research in the past, and what I will do in the future.

Research Objective

• A university needed to evaluate their brand value and understand declining enrollment in order to build a more meaningful brand promise based on academic offerings, student experience, and their prestige.
• They also needed to segment the market into distinct customer groups to target unique demographics groups more appropriately.

Scope & Methodology

• A survey was launched to measure a range of attributes including brand awareness and brand attributes.
• Prepared concepts were evaluated against a variety of emotional and rational perceptions. Each concept was evaluated in terms of the a set of key attributes, relevance, and preference.

Value Delivered

• The client learned where perceptions of their brand were falling short as well as which brand promise resonated and appealed the most with their target audience.
• The client was able to build a brand promise that was more meaningful to their customer base, and develop brand strategies that more accurately reflected the dynamics of their institution.

Check out other related case studies

• Increasing Customer Acceptance For Controversial Pet Food Format – A survey case study
• Improving Sales by Understanding Pain Points of Sales Reps – A home appliance survey case study
• Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Campaign with Brand and Message Recall – A consumer media survey case study