Using customer ideas to help develop realistic and appealing new products

Crowd sourcing can produce a rich pool of exciting product concepts, as the unfettered thinking and creative time that consumers enjoy means that they often come up with more innovative designs. Plus you’re getting NPD ideas that the consumers themselves have already endorsed as a good concept. But how do you balance desirable innovation against keeping the ideas realistic, and how do you spot the winning ideas? The answer is by combining crowd-sourcing, co-creation and standardised product testing.

Using crowd-sourcing in technology NPD

A recent crowd-sourcing study, run by GfK NOP in partnership with co-creation community eYeka.com, recently asked consumers to imagine their “ideal communication technology of the future”. Participants had the freedom to create a new device, a new service for an existing device, a piece of software or an application. Their solution could be designed to make their lives easier, more fulfilling, more productive, or just more fun – the only limit was that it had to be something that could conceivably exist in the next five years.

Exciting times lie ahead within the gaming industry and the buying options for new and used games have never been so wide. New game downloads are increasing at great speed and the used game market is strengthening, with Tesco, Asda and Argos all now offering a used game service. All this is great news for ‘gamers’ but the real opportunity is a platform which combines the two: trading online.

Electronic Arts CEO, John Riccitiello, recently claimed that 2011 will be the year revenues from downloadable games overtake the traditional out-of-box experience[i]. Being an avid gamer myself, a statement like this took me by surprise, especially coming from such a senior figure in the gaming industry. I have little doubt that this scenario will eventually happen, but this year?. There are two big reasons for my scepticism. First, the cost of new games – mixed with the widespread availability of cheap second hand games – and, second, limited storage space on consoles when used more widely in the ‘connected home’ rather than just for gaming.

Smartphones are competing with dedicated personal navigation devices (PNDs) for market share but recent research shows that PNDs are still preferred for in-car navigation. Smartphones can begin to win more market share by improving their user experience and integrating popular social networking and location based services.

Usage of mobile mapping and navigation services is booming. Almost a year ago Nokia announced that its mobile navigation service, Ovi Maps, would be free with a compatible Nokia handset. In the first week alone the service had been downloaded over 1.4 million times. According to Wikipedia Ovi Maps is now available in 74 countries and in 46 different languages. Similarly, Google now offers its mobile navigation services in 12 countries and it has proved a big hit with Google Android smartphone owners. Consequently, in the space of a couple of years the PND market has changed dramatically, with global in car satellite navigation providers such as TomTom and Garmin facing fresh competition from the all gadget devouring smartphone.