More and more awesome companies are creating remarkably innovative products. We discussed a lot of that in this post. A good majority of these products are not only beautiful but also solve real problems. How do these innovators and entrepreneurs develop such ground-breaking ideas? By developing unique insights! Innovative ideas are born out of original insight. But what is an insight? An insight is a deep intuitive understanding of people’s motivations and subsequent actions. This elaborate awareness of people is the spark for constant innovation. These understandings can’t be developed purely from data analysis and number crunching. Forming insights requires us to tap into our human-ness and explore people’s underlying emotions.
When we have richer insights about people, we have the tools to address their problems more effectively. One success story I love is about Embrace Innovations. Embrace started out of a Stanford class. Its co-founders started off with the challenge of giving millions of premature babies access to incubators that regulate a baby’s temperature and give them a better chance at life. They initially sought to build cheaper incubators for hospitals. However, after deliberate efforts to better understand their market in India, they realized that majority of premature births happen in rural areas far away from hospitals. Mothers didn’t have the resources to bring their premature babies to hospitals for care. So, even if Embrace had designed a cheaper and better incubator for hospitals, their efforts would be for naught if babies didn’t make it to the hospitals! To address this, Embrace created a product that looks like a baby-sized sleeping bag able to regulate a baby’s temperature. Their product is easily transportable to rural areas, a fraction of the cost of an incubator and functional without electricity. The product was a wild success and has reached 200,000 babies in various countries!
Where do we look for insight? The simple answer is: it all boils down to being curious about people and seeking to understand what drives them. Steve Jobs put it succinctly when he said, “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have”. Below are various methods to help develop insights:
Observe Your Own Pain Points
Tune in regularly into your emotions and observe when you are irked, stressed out, or inconvenienced. What situations trigger these emotions? What do you find frustrating or inconvenient? Is there a product or service that you find yourself wishing you had to help achieve an objective? Your pain points could very well be others’ pain points, too, and these provide an opportunity for innovation. The entrepreneur, Derek Sivers, for example, developed cdbaby out of a need. As a musician, he wanted to sell his CDs online. Big online record stores, however, did not sell independent music online unless they went through major distributors. Derek did not want to go through distributors who were notorious for bad business practices, so he decided to build an online store to sell his CDs. When he told his other musician friend about it, his friend asked if Derek could sell his CDs, too. Derek agreed as a favor to his friend. When other musicians heard about Derek’s online store, they asked if he could sell their CDs, too. Next thing he knew, he had 50 musicians selling through his site. Ten years later, he sold cdbaby for $22 million.
Observe Others
Go out into the world and pay close attention to how people behave. Observe how they interact with their world. For example, if the particular problem you want to solve is how to help parents feed their children healthier meals, go to where you might be able to observe parents make food decisions — in supermarkets, restaurants, maybe online. What do they purchase? How do they behave? Do they look at labels? Do they consult their children when purchasing? In restaurants, what do they order? Who does the ordering? Do parents try to influence behavior of children?
As you observe people, try to take note of anything that triggers certain behaviors? Are there any objects they are curious about? Are there any hacks or work-arounds that people apply? What creative ways do people resort to when no solution is in sight? Observing people can lead to discoveries of certain behavior that people don’t even realize they do!
Talk to People
Talk to people and probe their motivations. Be curious about what is driving their actions. If you interviewed parents about their family’s eating habits, you might want to ask them what they typically eat on a school night. How might this be different on the weekends. Why do they cook what they cook? What do they think is “healthy”? Why do they think certain foods are healthy versus others?
Don’t take answers at face value, and keep asking “why?” People may not know what drives certain behavior, and may need to be coaxed out by your digging. Ask them to demonstrate what they do. Shadow them. Ask them about any discrepancies you might find between what they say and what they do.
Talk to the Fringes of Your Market
Talk to people who are not your average consumer with respect to the problem you are trying to solve. For example, if you are trying to promote carpooling in large cities, try talking to people who are not your average commuters. Describe your target market by certain demographics, and go to the extreme of each demographic group. For example, you can group your target market by commuting mode. Your average commuter would either take public transportation or drive their cars to work. Now, think about people outside this “average”. You might want to talk to people with chauffeurs, or people who only ride their bikes, or people who only walk. These are the “extremes”.
Another demographic grouping might be by age group. Your average commuter might be between 18 and 50. So, you might want to reach out to people older or younger than this segment. You’ll be surprised by what insights they may bring to the table. Older commuters for example, may force you to think of a solution that accommodates physical limitations. Younger commuters may help shed light on the ease of different modes of transportation. By limiting your research to average consumers, you may very well be limiting yourself to average brain storming ideas. Talking to people in the fringes will help expand your idea-generation process to arrive at solutions that will be all the more innovative and inclusive.
Walk in Their Shoes
While it is important to observe and talk to people, there is nothing like developing real empathy for your user. To deeply understand a situation, it is critical to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and see for yourself what your consumers are experiencing. To understand commuters’ pain points, for example, go through the entire commuting process that they go through. Purchase a train ticket (do you buy online? at the booth?), look for the station (are signs and maps easy to understand?), try a carpooling method in your area (was one easy to find? was it easy to use?). Note your experiences.
As you go about these various methods in seeking insights, you will find patterns of behavior among the different people you talk to and observe. These could very well be corroborated by your own empathy exercise. These patterns or themes are the seeds of insights that fuel innovative ideas!
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” – Steve Jobs