Great Resources for Generating New Product Ideas

Did you know that your most lucrative and sustainable resource for designing new products is right in front of you? The key finding new ideas for a new product is listening to your customers, frustrated consumers and patients that use various medical devices to monitor activity. In today’s world, the traditional wisdom that says product development should only be an internal process is moot. Customers and consumers you interact with are more connected and engaged than ever, and people love to share details about what frustrates them most about a particular product. Often the best ideas come from solving common problems.

But how can you use online research communities to generate new ideas? Inviting your customers to be a part of your product development team can be an eye opening experience. Here’s how you can leverage your customers insights to come up with new consumer product design ideas.

Determine What Problem You Should Solve

The first step to any product development project, whether your goal is to design medical devices or a home improvement tool, is to figure out what your customers value or what problem with an existing product they are challenged with. Your customer base can help you identify what opportunities you should capitalize on or what problem you should solve. Before you attempt to come up with an idea, make sure your direction is relevant to what your customers want.

Your goal should be to get your customers to validate the direction your solutionis providing. If your customers encourage you to solve a specific problem, chances are that others may have similar challenges with that product. You can listen to your customers’ ideas by reading online reviews about a product, conducting research surveys in Facebook or a crowdsourcing app, or interviewing some customers.

Generate, Analyze, and Synthesize an Idea

Many people today are connected digitally with like-minded affinity groups.How big is that pool of people that can benefit from the new idea you are considering?Conduct customer research by strategically formulating your questions and sharing them in a controlled way without giving too much information about your idea away. Ask open ended questions like, “How would you like to see this item perform?” and then digest and evaluate the answers you get back. “What If…” questions help you fine tune your concepts.

Our consumer product design company has been able to help clients flesh out new features to existing product lines just by buying lunch for the employees one day and whiteboarding what comes out of the team’s imagination. A customer’s workforce is a treasure trove of new ideas if you know how to tap into their creativity. The patients of a clinical practice are also a great resource on how you may want to improve the design of medical devices that were used by them. That is a harder audience to tap as a group due to HIPPA and privacy laws but consulting with them one on one with a trusted clinician can be very beneficial. Product design consulting requires us to be open minded when seeking new ideas we may wish to bring to market.