Article written by Gareth Loudon of Light Minds Ltd

You have probably heard many times that products must meet a customer need to be successful. However if you are in the situation where you are developing a new product in the healthcare industry, how do go about discovering whether your product will meet the needs of patients, carers and key decision makers? This can be a difficult task, as quite often, they cannot tell you what they want. And if they can, that still might not lead to the creation of a successful new product. Research by Professor Clayton Christensen from the Harvard Business School finds that leading companies who have followed what their customers say have lost out to new innovations from other companies. This he has called “The Innovators Dilemma”. If this is true then maybe the traditional way of conducting market research is not adequate in the quest for discovering unmet customer needs and creating new disruptive product opportunities. What people say they want (and do) should not be the only deciding factor in creating new disruptive product innovations. So what are the alternatives? A new approach starting to become more widespread in industry is to conduct in-depth customer research and to treat potential customers as participants in the new product development process. In simple terms the approach is to

• Listen to what potential customers have to say.
• Observe what they currently do.
• Observe what they currently use.

In formal terms, this approach of in-depth customer research is known as ethnographic research and is defined as “the description and study of human culture”. It originates from anthropology where anthropologists spend significant periods of time with people from a specific cultural group and make detailed observations of their practices. Cultural groups could be tribes in the Amazon rainforest, teenagers, hospital patients, organizations and so on. In the area of new product development the customer research is conducted in a much shorter time scale to fit the needs of industry and is known as applied ethnography or rapid ethnographic research. However the research is still conducted in-context and takes place where people live and work, for example in homes, offices, hospitals etc. The power of taking such an approach is that it provides real life accounts of customers’ everyday activities, their behaviours, beliefs and values and highlights the differences between what people do and what they say they do. As a result needs are found that have not been directly expressed. Companies including Microsoft, Ericsson, IDEO, PDD, Light Minds and Kimberley Clark are using this approach to discover new product opportunities and also to evaluate products that are in the development stage. For example, Intel used ethnography to help develop some of the Allscripts Healthcare Solutions (www.allscripts.com). Bath University used ethnographic research to help design new information systems for the waiting rooms of Hospital emergency departments. It is also interesting to note that most of the new product ideas for the healthcare industry in the UK are coming from clinicians. I suggest this is because they are using ethnographic research techniques routinely (knowingly or not) as part of their everyday work. Once you have identified unmet needs of potential customers the next challenge is to make sure you translate these findings into a successful new product solution.

Gareth Loudon is a co-founder of Light Minds Ltd.