Our Client’s Challenge:
Our client’s staff of engineers mathematicians, physicists, and researchers continuously invented products and services that were amazing but no one really needed. As a result, they spent years and millions of dollars on projects that ultimately yielded no internal sponsorship and no external customers.
Bringing a new practice to research and development
Client: Pitney Bowes
Our Solution:
Icnivad was brought in to create an innovation pipeline that would ground their inventions in real user needs and market demands. We helped re-design their organization by launching a new innovation laboratory.
This laboratory is composed of multi-disciplinary teams of technologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, designers, and human factors professionals. The goal is to understand customer needs through a series of time-delineated projects.
Project teams follow an iterative process that begins with immersion into a domain. The team works to understand market segmentation, competition, and business strategies with the goal of focusing innovation towards the largest opportunity. Engagement teams observe customers in their own environments to discover their needs and pains. Through disciplined analytics to validate what we have learned. Customer feedback directs the next iteration of prototypes. In some cases a prototype will resonate strongly, in other cases feedback will redirect or more tightly focus the next iteration
The outcome of an Innovation Laboratory project is a series of customer validated prototypes and a business model that tells the story of how customer value is created, how the value can be captured and how our client can play and win in the target market. If there is a compelling business model, the concept moves into the next step in the innovation pipeline.
With the same number of resources, the Innovation Laboratory now moves 4 times the number of projects through their pipeline and has increased the amount of corporate sponsorship.
Our Team:
- Ethnographic Research
- Business Analysis
- Interaction Design
- Product Designers
- Design Thinkers