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Idea Evaluation

Judge ideas based on their ability to help your business, not on their popularity or support by an executive.

The Problem

Designers and marketers of products, whether physical or online, are constantly looking to predict how that product will perform in the marketplace. Will our product perform better than our competitor's? Which interface design will attract more sign ups? Which product concept will be more successful?

Typically the way companies answer these questions is to hire market research firms to conduct surveys, focus groups, and analytic research. But there are problems that arise from this approach:

• Market researchers tend to focus on testing a target demographic, whether that demographic has proven to be good prognosticators of performance or not;
• Companies moving in to a new product area have no historic data to rely upon; and
• Traditional methodology does not support quick, iterative, testing based on rapid change during product development

The Solution

When you recruit hundreds of people to answer a survey, sit in a focus group, or test a product, after they've fulfilled the task you ask them to complete, they go away and you never talk to them again. With an Inkling site, you can create a community you can continuously tap to make predictions, or use the Inkling widgets or API to bring Inkling functionality to an existing Market Research Online Community (MROC.)

Using your own employees or a group of people you recruit, you will not only be able to solicit their predictions about future product performance, but also begin to understand more about the participants themselves: Who are my best predictors? What does my group predict accurately? What are the limits of their knowledge or experience? Why are they predicting one way or another?

An Example

A consumer product company is launching a new product in a new market segment and is looking to understand how that product will perform against incumbent products. In addition to performance, the company would like to understand the effectiveness of their marketing campaign from a brand and "buzz" perspective.

Question	Prediction
How many views will our television commercial get on YouTube after the first month it's released?	250k - 500k
What age group will buy the highest volume of our new product?	Ages 21-25
What will be the biggest complaint we will receive at our 1-800 customer number?	Parts need to be special ordered

Benefits

Asking your customers (and employees) what they think people will like versus simply asking them what they personally like, changes the game:

• Dramatically increase value from your research subjects: Foster an ongoing relationship with a community who will give you continuous feedback.
• Filter results for what matters: Use Inkling to determine who is good and bad at predicting the success of products in your market
• Tap your own employees: Chances are your employees are also users of your (and your competitor's) products. Use that to your advantage.

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