For brands today, innovation is essential not just for developing new products but also for enhancing communication, operational processes, and go-to-market strategies. How do you make sure you have a pipeline of new and commercially viable products? This is where front-end innovation can help.  

What is front-end innovation?

Front-end innovation is defined as the initial phase of the innovation process, where ideas are generated, explored, and developed into potential products, services, marketing messages, or solutions. 

Also called early-stage innovation, this phase bridges the gap between customer insights and innovation, ensuring that new ideas are grounded in real customer needs and have the potential to succeed in the market.

For market researchers and customer insights professionals, this phase is crucial because it involves:

• Identifying unmet consumer needs and market opportunities
• Generating and refining creative ideas for new products or services, or enhance existing products through consumer feedback and insights
• Validating concepts to ensure commercial viability and market fit
• Fostering collaboration between consumers and the brand throughout the development process
• Driving sustainable growth and long-term business success through continuous innovation

Unfortunately, traditional innovation research methods can be slow and one-sided, often missing critical insights and focusing more on screening ideas than incorporating the consumer voice into the process. They frequently fail to capture the necessary insights because they are static and disconnected from the dynamic ways consumers interact with products and brands in their daily lives. This can result in ideas that are not grounded in real customer needs and have, therefore, no commercial viability. 

It’s clear that we need a new way to conduct early-stage innovation research. 

Improving front-end innovation with conversational research  

What if we met people where they are, using a medium that is completely familiar to them to collect insights? More than 5 billion people use messaging apps. In the United States alone, text messaging (92%) is one of the most widely used forms of communication. People are used to communicating in a mobile chat format. It is familiar, comfortable and accessible.

Front-end innovation that leverages the power of mobile technology, AI, and conversational research design can overcome the challenges insight professionals and product teams face with traditional research methods. This approach creates an immersive, organic, and dynamic ecosystem that engages consumers directly, increasing the depth and richness of insights for early-stage product innovation. 

Our Early Stage Innovation, Ideation and Co-Creation solution, powered by Rival Technologies, captures real consumer insights in an immersive ecosystem. By engaging people where they are, in the real world, and in real time, this approach creates an open dialogue that drives higher engagement and gathers more candid feedback on potential innovations — throughout the product ideation and development process.

Early-stage innovation research for agile brands

To stay ahead, brands need an approach that is fast, scalable, and capable of developing, screening, optimizing, and commercializing new innovations. Reach3’s flexible innovation framework is grounded in four key pillars, each customizable based on your innovation goals:

1. Territory exploration and needs identification: This first phase is a deep dive into consumer experiences to uncover whitespace opportunities, unmet needs, and jobs to be done. The idea here is to start broad and then explore and quantify the territories upon which future innovation will have the greatest ROI for the brand and business. We often think of this as foundational in nature. Here, we seek to gain a 360° view of consumer needs, market size, strategic alignment, and commercial potential using conversational surveys, video feedback, and advanced analytics.
   
   
2. Ideation: After territory is identified, we want to encourage creative thinking and generate new ideas, eliciting consumer and brand ideas, and using diverse tactics for implicit, gut reactions. This stage is geared toward developing new ideas that are rooted in unmet needs and bringing the consumer voice into the innovation process. Our conversational approach ensures consumers feel safe in this phase of the ideation process, with a “no idea is a bad idea” vibe. Based on their input, we can pull forward some of those ideas that are going to be really meaningful because they come straight from the intended market. 
   
   
3. Co-creation and refinement: Here, we take an iterative, workshop-style approach to idea refinement based on commercial viability. The Rival platform lets you easily re-contacts consumers in real-time so they can rate, refine, and improve top ideas with highly engaging methodologies. This stage challenges consumers to make the ideas that we've narrowed down from previous phases better, to add things that would help meet a need or complete a job. It’s not unusual for us to leverage techniques such as a MaxDiff or build-your-own exercises here.
   
   
4. Optimization: We see this step as bringing consumers into the boardroom, encouraging them to imagine they are responsible for launching a new product innovation. Hearing directly from consumers in terms of “these are the ideas that we think are the best” is invaluable. Utilize an agile approach for presenting refined ideas to consumers for real-time feedback, helping to accurately predict idea success and finalize concepts to go to market.

Examples of early-stage product innovation research

In our recent masterclass webinar on modern research techniques for early stage innovation, our CEO Matt Kleinschmit and SVP Katie Sheehan shared a few Reach3 case studies that illustrated the importance of engaging, and re-engaging the consumer throughout the front-end innovation process. 

Innovation to catch Gen Z’s eye
In one example, a Fortune 500 CPG company was interested in finding out how to best engage Gen Z surrounding Limited Time Offers (LTOs). In this “territory exploration and needs identification” research stage, we engaged Gen Z respondents and had a conversation with them around the topic of LTOs: how do you use them, where do you find them, what do you like, what catches your eye in terms of limited-time offerings?

Participants uploaded photos and captioned them to indicate what caught their eye. They also shared their ideas with us for a limited-time offering that would meet their needs. These conversational surveys gathered feedback on this powerful generation’s excitement and actions related to LTOs, highlighting the best approach.

Co-creating products in the highly competitive snack sector
For another project, a category leader in the snack space was seeking to develop a product to fuel the lifestyle of an active and busy, yet health-conscious consumer. The territory within the snack space had already been identified, so at this point we were pursuing the “co-creation” stage. We engaged target consumers in a build-your-own exercise to design their ideal snack, focusing on natural ingredients, protein, vitamins, antioxidants, and clean energy.

We asked questions like: "Is this the packaging that you would wanna see? What's the flavor profile? How should someone feel when they're consuming this snack? What are the claims that would be important to someone, and who would this actually be for? Who do you see eating this?" This provided foundational direction based on consumer preferences (including the “whys”), enabling the creation of fully developed, validated product concepts.

These are just a couple of examples of how using fast, agile, and iterative methodology to capture feedback can invigorate the front-end innovation process. SMS notifications can deliver practically instantaneous consumer feedback as well as continuous re-engagement. Our insight platform integrates quant, qual, and video feedback in one research touchpoint, speeding up execution. Impactful reporting humanizes data with multimedia inputs and stepwise learning, providing actionable insights for subsequent product innovation stages.

Activate results for successful product innovation

Putting insights to action is always the most exciting part of any research project. Getting the study’s “gold nuggets” into the hands of the right people across organizations is a critical step.

To make sure that the best and most commercially viable ideas make the next step in the innovation process, we offer a full suite of modern deliverables that help research teams socialize insights across functional areas. With 24/7 access to real-time reports and toplines, teams stay updated, while visually engaging, interactive mobile deliverables help communicate findings among key stakeholders. Curated digital stories and video reels bring the voice of the customer into the boardroom, making insights tangible and actionable.

This approach helps brands pursuing early-stage innovation to refine and improve ideas continuously, creating the right products for their audiences. 

Understanding more about early-stage product innovation research

To learn more about our methodology and hear best practices and case studies from companies in various sectors, watch our on-demand masterclass webinar. 

The webinar includes insights on:

• The limitations of using traditional survey approaches for new product / service ideation and co-creation
• The evolution of early-stage innovation research and why a modern, longitudinal approach is necessary in today's landscape 
• How to use conversational research design principles and AI-powered, mobile-first approaches to better understand unmet needs, usage occasions and "jobs to be done"
• How companies in financial services, CPG, retail and others use modern approaches to develop their innovation pipeline and launch successful products and services in the market

Discover how conversational research can transform your approach to product innovation and drive lasting growth when you learn how to continuously incorporate high-quality consumer feedback in your product development process. 

Curious to learn more? Read more about our Early Stage Innovation, Ideation and Co-creation solution here.