Innovation & Product Development
Launching winning new products is a crucial route to business growth. However, failure rates are higher than ever and big ideas are hard to come by. Spotting obvious winners isn’t hard, but throwing away more genuinely innovative ideas is easy too. Our proven approach helps shift the odds in your favor.
40 years of innovation expertise and a database of over 60,000 cases tells us what drives success.
The secret to new product success
The secret to new product success is knowing exactly:
- Where to look for the most promising ideas:
- What to look for in a great idea
Let's look at both...
Knowing WHERE to look:
Consumers get excited by ideas that address a genuine need. An in-depth understanding of consumers' needs, occasion requirements and market conditions is essential in uncovering breakthrough opportunities and prioritising resources behind exciting and winning concepts.
Knowing WHAT to look for:
Three critical factors influence long term potential for a new product or service:
- Clarity: a clear, recognizable point of difference
- Relevance: a point of difference that provides a relevant benefit
- Excitement: a benefit exciting enough to overcome barriers to trial and usage
Among these factors, excitement is the most crucial: it can dramatically accelerate trial and repeat of a new product or service by generating word of mouth, especially among consumers that are key influencers.
The TNS Innovation Journey
The mental framework and comprehensive methodology for our services is the Innovation Journey, which ensures consumer insight at the heart of the idea is kept alive right through launch. Each step in the research process informs the next, using validated key metrics to optimize our clients' chances of success.
- Opportunity & Insight Identification/Prioritization: employing InsightmentTM and Matrix
- Focused Creativity for Concept Development: employing Super Group©
- Concept Screening: employing Concept eValuateTM
- Concept Refinement and Product Development: employing Super Clinic©, Product eValuate, and ValueManager
- Launch Decision and Optimization: employing Launch eValuate
Insightment™ ─ Translate consumer behavior into insights that will grow your business
Innovation success comes from meeting real consumer needs, but to uncover those needs you need genuine insights - insights that lead you to a profound intersection where consumers' needs are identified, the barriers are understood, and new strategic business opportunities are identified for your brand. Our Insightment process helps clients identify this intersection.
First, we employ our proprietary qualitative immersion toolkit to collect observations surrounding consumers' perceptions, attitudes, behaviors and desires to a given category. We combine this with trend information and quantitative data to capture the most relevant observations for the strategic challenge.
The observations are brought together in our Insightment Workshop, where our professional facilitators use leading-edge creative techniques and a structured divergent-convergent process to translate those observations into insights. This full-day collaborative workshop engages and involves your cross-functional team to get to the heart of consumer desires to develop actionable insight platforms that can be leveraged in ideation and concept development initiatives that will grow your business.
For more information and examples of where Insightment has been used, click here.
Super Group© ─ Balancing creativity with discipline ensures actionable insights that lead to winning concepts!
Our ideation methodology, Super Group, leverages best practices in creative problem-solving and lateral thinking techniques, and is enhanced by the power of our strategically grounded approach to innovation. Each ideation is custom-designed and rooted in real consumer insights to ensure relevance to your business needs.
Super Group is led by our high-energy professional facilitators who provide a dynamic, energetic environment that encourages collaboration. We believe that creativity is ignited when you bring the 'right' people together in the 'right' ways, so we combine your cross-functional team with creative consumers and industry experts to bring a fresh, new perspective and outside-in thinking to your challenge. We have established panels of creative consumers all over the world who are selected for their extroverted personality and creative ability and trained in creative problem-solving techniques push to breakthrough ideas.
On Day 1 of the Super Group, your team will generate hundreds of exciting, relevant "seed" ideas. We then use strategic convergence techniques to select the "best" ideas that will be developed into detailed concept blueprints and fully written test-ready concepts that can be taken into qualitative or quantitative testing.
The result is a pipeline of strategic ideas that will fuel immediate and long-term growth!
Super Clinic© ─Your fastest and most customer-centric option for concept refinement
Super Clinic is an intensive two-day workshop using creative, early adopter and mainstream consumers to provide constructive creative feedback to understand relevance and enhance language. This mix of participants–combined with a participative client team–means an idea can be developed mainstream-ready with no loss of creative spark.
Super Clinic is your fastest option for concept refinement. Our experienced facilitators take your concepts through a critical evaluation process with consumers, based on the factors we know are vital for great innovation. We use the consumer feedback to iteratively refine the concepts in real-time, so by the end of the workshop you'll have streamlined, rewritten concepts ready for approval–and the market.
Concept eValuate™ ─Spot winning concepts and keep future hits alive
Spotting the winning new product at the initial concept stage can be easy–if you use the right approach. Unfortunately, many companies rely on conventional research methods that tend to ignore the "early adopters" in the segment which leads to (incorrectly) dismissing breakthrough ideas.
Concept eValuate is a concept screening tool designed to identify and protect breakthrough ideas. Unlike other screening tools, it doesn't just predict mainstream wins, it lets you identify great ideas the market may not even be ready for.
