Setting up an innovation project: Pain points

After having stated the observation of how innovation projects are too often approached and discussed the the philosophy of our approach to the innovation pyramid in the first two parts of this series of articles, we will now go into more detail about the approach to innovation projects. And since we have to start with something, we might as well start at the beginning: the pain points.

The floors of the pyramid in detail : The points of pain

This step, crucial to the success of your future innovation, is often underestimated, wrongly so. Just as surely as a novelty that does not respond to any real problem will not be adopted by the market, disregarding one's intuitions and going out into the field to collect high-potential problems is the best starting point one can imagine for success. A significant part of the energy to be invested in the implementation of an innovation project must be spent here. No one wants to spend their time or money solving insignificant or non-existent problems, especially since they are inevitably a guarantee of a future project with insignificant ambitions as well.
Echoing the first article in the series, which made the observation that going headlong into an idea without having identified the point of pain that is to be solved and verified that it exists and that it is important is an extremely risky decision. According to our experience, this is the first cause of crashes in startups and more generally in innovation projects in the broad sense.

But what makes a good pain point? It must be widely shared by the intended target and not derived from a discussion with a single person leading to an exceptional case. This is the commonality. It must be a source of significant frustration for the user. It is the user who must feel this frustration and not you who think that the subject has this need. This is the criticality character (qualitative). The impacted target must be large enough to bring a potential. This is the quantitative character. The presence of this pain point must be repeated as often as possible. Being confronted with this problem once a year or 4 times a day totally changes its gravity. This is the character of occurrence. A good pain point is therefore an important frustration, with a good occurrence, affecting a large enough target to define a good potential value to be captured by an innovation.

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Innovation Pyramid: How to identify pain points?

Several approaches exist to collect these pain points, each with their advantages and disadvantages. The right and relevant choice of approaches will make the collection successful, while trying at all times to keep a maximum of objectivity and avoid bias. These approaches can be classified into several categories, but I will only mention two here: theoretical approaches and field approaches.
Theoretical approaches allow for a meticulous and exhaustive analysis of the uses, interactions and personalities of the users of a theme. They offer the advantage of quickly bringing to light a large number of hypothetical pain points that are not easily identified in the field. Obviously, this step is done before the field approaches, since the pain points thus created will have to be validated by the field approaches.
At the level of the field approaches, we find more classical methods such as observation, surveys, immersion and many others. These approaches must be selected carefully and must be done in a certain order and in a certain way to avoid bias. Fieldwork is more time and resource consuming, hence the importance of good preparation and the use of theoretical approaches to optimize this part.

Finally, a selection step is necessary to focus on those with potential. The burning pain points are those on which there is the most potential to create value. This is also done by following the criteria defined above as well as more strategic criteria related to the activity of your company or simply your appetite for certain subjects.

Now that you've identified the high-potential pain points, you'll have to figure out how to solve them and thus provide a solution to your target. That's what the next article in this series is all about: Solutions.

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