How to Validate Innovation Roadmaps with Market Research
What is an Innovation Roadmap?
An innovation road map is a critical navigation tool in the innovation process. It is a ‘plan-on-a-page’ for any kind of strategies or goals represented over time. The map itself helps to provide focus, orientation, pathways to success and provides an effective communication tool, to keep everyone on the same page.
Innovation road maps are also known as a product roadmap, designed to encapsulate a new product development pipeline over time with a plan of action for how a product or solution will evolve over time right up to launch. Time may be represented as different horizons or steps in the launch plan. The following diagram is a very simple plan sketch.
What is the Goal of Innovation Road Mapping?
The goal of innovation road mapping is to develop your innovation strategy. Road mapping can help you connect technology, R&D, marketing and operations to customer needs. It can provide your business with a portfolio development strategy but also a common, shared language to not only map but also understand the opportunity pathways available to your business and to gather business reality around these.
The overall idea is to get people aligned and working together on future business outcomes. A strong road map will help you:
- Develop a culture of innovation and identify focus areas in the business
- Generate breakthrough solutions
- Identify the most profitable opportunities for your business
- Clarify current and new customer targets
- Create strong launch strategies and consider ROI
- Validate a roadmap at leadership level
- Test and validate ideas to increase success rate
- Lower risk and create business cases
How do I build an Innovation Road Map?
The development of a roadmap for your business will depend on who is driving this and the culture of the business. An NPD (new product development) pipeline should get you started thinking about rollout of new product concepts or idea. This could also apply to the development and rollout of new services or technology products and services. Not only is it important to create the roadmap, but also to test it. Market research can help with this.
For the purposes of this article, we will focus on product innovation roadmaps. These may contain the following elements:
- Trends and foresight
- Product concepts or ideas
- Capability
- Market sizing, forecasting and target identification information
- Horizons for launch (e.g., Next 12 months, next 24 months or H1, H2, H3)
- Measures such as e.g., timing, market research, KPIs and success factors
Validating Innovation Road Maps with Market Research
You need to test and validate your roadmap to make faster, more informed decisions. This can be done by gathering customer or consumer evidence to clarify the gap that the idea fills and reduce the risk. We gather evidence through market research either sizing the gap, the need or testing prototypes with target audiences.
There are 4 simple steps to validation.
- Create your draft roadmap: what are the launch horizons for the ideas and how far out are you planning these?
- Define your focus: where do the ideas fit in the innovation funnel – who are we going to verify our ideas with (customers, government, suppliers, senior stakeholders) and what type of research do we need for validation?
- Create hypothesis for testing: what are your assumptions? Some are simple to validate, some are much harder. Prioritise assumptions into what the customer can help you with, and what business, or other stakeholders can help you with.
- Choose a research design to test your assumptions: what are the most suitable research methods to test your assumptions? Do you need primary research – qualitative focus groups or consumer co creation to help you build on your ideas, or do you need robust quantitative research to help size the prize or problem you have estimated? Will secondary research be enough? It is also a good idea to conduct some historical analysis – as innovation is cyclical. Try to understand if these pathways been tried before and how could technology and modern options improve on that thinking?
Market research agencies can assist with a range of innovation and road mapping needs. From ideation and planning through to scenario planning and validation of ideas and roadmaps. If you are uncertain about the kind of research or validation you require, a market research agency like Ruby Cha Cha who has experience and focus in this space can help you consider the brief you require.
Want to know more?
Get in touch with our team of market research and innovation experts here at Ruby Cha Cha. We are happy to answer your questions and help you make the right agile market research decisions.