Co-Creation and Customer Insight Communities

New ideas can be generated through a large range of VoC research methods. IFT’s Co-Creation and Insight Club solution combines some of the most powerful methods by creating private online communities of actual and potential customers to help you create innovative products and services.

VoC Challenges

The challenges with conventional VoC research include:

The research generates plenty of data but struggles to make meaningful connections and insights. Many companies use conventional methodologies which typically only report on existing customer behavior.

Customers often fail to articulate needs or benefits beyond what they’ve already experienced.

Conventional research methods are plagued with pitfalls such as response bias and limited by format, duration and venue.

Many companies use the same toolkit to gather customer insights so the results are undifferentiated and all competitors are chasing the same general trends.

The result is that conventional VoC research often generates only incremental innovations.

IFT’s Co-Creation and Insight Solutions

IFT offers two ways to benefit from private on-line communities:

Full Service: we take the overall responsibility of implementing the community, animating it according to your needs, analyzing the results, providing you with monthly summary reports and with final recommendations on 5 to 8 major opportunities to innovate.
Platform Service: we provide you with our selected, state-of-the-art, community software platform and assist you in implementing and using it. You create your communities, animate them and analyze the results to define your innovation tracks. We assist you in the use of the software platform when needed.

We can organize communities all over the world in any language, provided the targeted members have access to Internet. We can recruit members from commercial panels or through direct approach and will select them according to company specific criteria.

Key components of a successfull Co-Creation community

Recruitment and qualification of the on-line community with typically 50-400 members who are existing or potential customers or lead users of your products/services and who will participate for 3-6 months or more in the community.

A private web site to solicitate insights from participants using a variety of interactive stimuli: surveys, open questions, regularly posted creative and projective activities, monitored forum, concept evaluation, field testing, etc.

The ability to analyze insights at any time during the life of the community so as reorient the study content and introduce new material

Strategic objectives to categorize and prioritize problems and opportunities in a specific area of products and services with a goal of defining 5-8 promising white spaces for innovation.

Example Solutions

Look at how Co-Creation Communities
helped DBApparel (Wonderbra, Dim, etc.)
to better innovate.

Example Solution Capabilities

Why are Co-Creation and Insight Communities better?

Co-Creation and Insight Communities offer a new approach to VoC that delivers much deeper insights and more breakthrough ideas:

The sole focus is innovation and identifying 5 to 8 significant opportunities Anytime access to the web-site allows members to provide more thoughtful responses as the time and location or participation is convenient Both group discussion and individual responses ensure that all voices are heardMotivations, experiences, preferences, and brainstorming deliver broader, more relevant consumer insights The longer duration of the club lets you probe more deeply to understand the utility and social and emotional needs of the customer You have flexibility to “chase” interesting insights, as they emerge during the club participation Technology allows you a broad range of activities to stimulate and reward member participation, creativity and collaboration