Goal Directed Research for Innovation Planning in Emerging Markets

What differentiates the research conducted to inform the design of an innovative product or service, in an untapped market? Michael Kimani asked me this question during a recent Skype conversation and I promised to write out the answer.

• Goal directed research for innovation planning seeks to discover opportunities for new products and services for a particular market or population segment.
• This means the scope must be broad enough to gather evidence of a market opportunity, customer needs and willingness to pay, as well as identify the constraints and barriers in both the environment (such as infrastructure) and the target population.
• Looking for evidence of a viable value proposition and/or a business model is what distinguishes this type of early stage research from traditional product and service design research whose goals are to discover the optimal design solution for a particular task and target audience.
• Unlike academic research, there may not always be a hypothesis to be validated at inception, nor the outcome pure knowledge.
• Instead, there is a goal driving the design of the research, whether broad focused and exploratory, or narrow focused and specific.
• This initiating goal can be set at three levels:
  • Sector specific
    • An example of sector specific goal setting would be to explore the potential for financial products and services for a bank. Alternately, this can be framed as identifying opportunities for innovation in financial services.
  • Demographic specific
    • A startup with a product or service under development may want to discover which segments of the target population should be prioritized for their product testing and launch. Alternately, a consumer products manufacturer might want to explore wholly new markets and the customization required for their product range.
  • Outcome specific
    • A popular outcome specific research framing that is sector and population agnostic is “What are the barriers to adoption for our intended innovation among this target audience?” We have conducted such research for a wide range of objectives, from the introduction of sustainable agricultural techniques among farmers in rural East Africa, to insights driving product development for a fintech startup.

The challenge in untapped markets is a dearth of legacy data and consumer insights, hence the need for more discovery driven exploration upfront prior to drilling down to specific research focus areas. In the forthcoming post, I will share our customization of Vijay Kumar’s innovation planning methodology developed over the past few years in situ during projects in East Africa. Note that subsequent research to inform the specific concept design of a product or service will have more of an indepth focus on the target demographic and their particular context.