Cast your mind back to November 2006 when Nintendo, with much furore, released the Nintendo Wii. Nothing like it had been seen before, a games console with a motion sensing controller. Fast forward four years and Microsoft have taken the motion sensing phenomenon one step further and developed Kinect (the controller-free gaming experience for Microsoft’s Xbox 360). With the gaming industry delivering new innovations to the user experience and interactions with video games, GfK is curious as to what the future gaming experience will look like and whether motion sensing or controller lead technologies will emerge as the dominant experiences of the future.

 

NFC technology has the ability to transform smartphones into virtual wallets, where users pay for transactions simply by waving their phone at an appropriate receiver terminal. However, it also has much wider applications, allowing for synchronised content and services across the mobile ecosystem [1]. The reward for owning this relationship in the mobile space is enormous, and as a result everyone, from mobile operators to device manufacturers, is fighting for a share.

The industry message seems clear; mobile payments will be big over the next five years – big news and big profits. The technology has been around in various forms for years and, now that leading names such as Apple, Google and RIM are designing and manufacturing NFC-equipped devices, many commentators predict that mobile payments will skyrocket [2].

However, while this will undoubtedly be a major growth area for the future, such reports seldom address the fact that the journey to full consumer adoption is not without its pitfalls.

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.