When you’re an industry leader, you need to constantly innovate and reinforce your brand position to stay ahead of the competition.  But 90% of new product launches fail, and many take 18-24 months to get to market, meaning larger companies often cede market innovations to upstarts.    That’s where having insights into market trends and the ability to convert those trends into winning product innovation ideas becomes a critical and sustainable advantage. 

Right now, there are a lot of ways flooding the market on how to come up with new product innovation ideas.  Traditional innovation models follow a long sustained process that involves focus groups, surveys, consultants, writing agencies and more to build and test an idea.   Each of these has a common theme – the introduction of human bias.    A new set of tools are challenging the market with faster and better idea creation via various AI and LLMs.   

AI-generated (or assisted) product ideas must be grounded in data (and reality) 

At a base level you could of course just ask ChatGPT for product ideas – and it will come up with them.   But are the ideas any good?  What data  do they use to score based on quality?  Can they be filtered for quality?  Can they be aligned to your company approach to building and targeting the right markets (the right size or stage: new market creation, emerging market takeover, established market competition etc.)?  

I asked ChatGPT to come up with innovative ideas with at least a market potential of $10m and included the following.  Would you activate cleaning product fogger in your home with your family breathing the air? 

i-Genie’s Trends and Innov8 are based on tens of billions of searches, social posts, UGC videos, and ratings and reviews.  Our Trends Future Factor Ranking algorithm is more effective at accurately predicting trends 6 months earlier than social listening tools, and captures the types of needs consumers are willing to search for but not tout on social media (embarassing or highly personal needs, health issues, nuanced questions, etc.).  And then Innov8 creates a universe of tens of thousands of ideas and scores predictive consumer demand to ensure you focus on the best ideas – and eliminate the crazy (foggier) ones.

Putting Innov8’s product ideas to the test

One of our large multi-national clients to put Innov8 to the test.  Can Innov8 really outperform traditional product innovation processes and provide product pipelines in 80% less time?   From a universe of tens of thousands ideas, Innov8 scored the best ones in terms of predictive consumer demand and uniqueness in the market.   They selected 10 ideas that met their criteria, aligning with market trends that were strategic, holes in their existing product portfolio and markets that were mature enough and active on search and social to be worth winning.  

They compared those 10 Innov8 ideas to the 20 ideas that were already in their pipeline and had been vetted via focus groups and survey responses.   Together we scored them using an internal feedback mechanism we use at i-Genie and then again through the customers own processes for validating customer demand of product ideas.  The results were jaw dropping.  

Innov8 produces 9 of the 10 top product innovation ideas!

In the first test Innov8 produced 9 of the 10 top ideas and in the client’s second test using existing processes, i-Genie produced 8 of the top 10 ideas.  It was clear that Innov8 was producing better ideas, faster and 80% cheaper than existing processes, but how could that be?  

We as market researchers design consumer feedback to minimize human biases, but there is only so much we can do.  We are limited by respondent formats, time, limited sample sizes, market research survey fraud, and of course internal processes with qualitative data overseen by humans.  

By contract Innov8 provide them data-driven answers to which products would actually meet the needs of consumers based on synthesizing Trends and product ideas from tens of billions of consumer searches, social and video posts, ratings and reviews.   Human biases are minimized by exploding the data set several orders of magnitude, and then applying specialized AI to the scoring (not generic LLMs like ChatGPT).  

Augmenting Intelligence With AI To Transform Product Innovation And R&D

Our approach with Innov8 and all of our product is that our AI stands for “Augmenting Intelligence.”  These tools empower Innovation and R&D departments to create a pipeline of winning ideas better, faster and cheaper.    If you want to see Innov8 at work and how we can help augment the intelligence of your teams, click Book Demo now.