ABSTRACT
The earliest phase of product development is aimed at answering the questions of what to build and who will buy it. Traditional approaches to answering these questions tend to be based on the notion of extending current products by adding new functionality (Kumar and Whitney, 2007). Thus, the research to define the concept and market for the new product focuses on how customers react to current products or preconceived prototypes. Surveys, focus groups, and interviews are commonly used to identify problems with the current product and improvements that the customer would like to see. There is nothing particularly wrong with this approach if your goal is to define an incremental extension of an existing product in a tactical manner. But it artificially constrains the scope of the user needs investigated to those that are closely associated with the legacy product and thus were previously expressed to developers. It constrains our knowledge of the context of product use to those contexts that the customers remember to report in the survey, interview, or focus group session. The result is that the knowledge of the user and product which we gain from this exercise is detached from the natural phenomena of the users’ lives. Unmet user needs are missed if they lie in the space adjacent to the need met by the existing product. Completely new needs within the space go unstated. It is not surprising that this traditional market-oriented approach rarely leads to insights that translate into highly innovative extensions of the legacy products or altogether new products in adjacent or completely new spaces.
