User driven product innovation

Abstract

Accelerating diffusion of innovation to end users and enabling faster adoption is essential to product developers, especially in the industries having a rapid pace of innovation. The ability of innovators to engage with the user community to understand their needs, motivations and top issues is critical to developing products that hit the mark on meeting user needs. In the computing industry there is a need to evolve the innovation development process in parallel to the exponential growth in complexity of the products and the broad ecosystem support that is required to meet user expectations. There are many paths to engage a user community and to obtain end user insights to create a product vision and new usage models. A simple "proof of concept" framework extending product research and development to the end user community is articulated herein. This proof of concept framework is defined in the context of a platform - a collection of ingredients that work together to meet user need. Proof of concept is conducted with users prior to general availability of a product with early ingredients that are in the research and development pipeline. All business users of new product platforms do not adopt an innovation at the same time and can be qualitatively placed in widely accepted classification of adopter categories based on their receptivity to adopting a new product. The leading adopter categories in order are the innovator, early adopter and early majority. These categories of users may help shape current and future generations of a product specifically by validating usage scenarios with integration and deployment of a product under development in real user settings, and by helping to define trends and map requirements for future generations of platform capabilities. Using the proof of concept framework in this way helps ensure that when a product goes to market, it simply works and meets user expectations.

The importance of recognizing a user need cannot be understated. The user feedback from the platform proof of concept stimulates research and development activities to address specific user needs in the current or future generations of a product platform. There are multiple communication channels for potential adopters of an innovation. Mass media channels are effective means to create awareness of an innovation. Proof of concepts with potential users enables more rapid eventual diffusion by translating user deployment and integration learning's into product characteristics that are broadly appealing to potential adopters.