Thomas George, MD at DoWell GmbH, explains how Open Innovation, enhanced by UX Research, can help high growth companies to stay relevant in the competitive world

Investment on new product development, User Experience and innovation is showing a massive rise in every vertical. Market study reports from various market research organizations are showing innovation spending by high growth companies including the likes of Amazon, Apple, Adidas and Airbus grew at 6 per cent CAGR from 2012-2017, from $361bn (£276bn) to $465bn. Studies also reveal that 62 per cent of companies are planning to apply innovation practices to stay relevant in the face of competition from rival companies.

What companies do differently?
Now, companies use an open innovation process to get value out of their investments, as the traditional approach to innovation was mostly in-house, in which the product was developed in the company itself and then taken to the market, and often in the end, the product was rejected by the user for its deficiencies.

DoWell Research has adopted and developed open innovation to support companies to improve the user friendliness of their products and services. The process starts with ideation, concept development, designing, rapid prototyping and evaluation of the product. Empathy for the end user is the key to the open innovation process for developing products for companies. Open Innovation helps companies to create user friendly products and services.

User validation
Companies look for insights from their customers when developing apps and products, but often find that challenging due to differences between the users in different markets. DoWell’s User Experience team captures the insights from users in local markets and shows how users differ based on their ethnic or cultural life. These critical insights from the local users are then fed back to the app developers for product development.

Customers are always looking for something unique, or for new features, and theirs taste varies from market to market. The user insights are explored by UX validation experts to produce fully validated and commercially viable products for targeted markets. The user insights are explored using methodologies such as depth interviews, qualitative and focus group studies.

True moments feedback
Companies want to get close to their consumers to understand how their customers and users feel about their products during real-life situations. They want to get user insights from the natural settings of their users and know how the products are used in different situations.

DoWell Research’s expertise in UX Research helps to gather the user experience in local conditions using ethnography, cognitive walkthroughs and home tests. The users are interviewed inside their homes and offices to collect information from a real-life context to get the true moments. For example, if a person is booking a taxi in the African city of Lagos, the UX team collects the user experience from that moment and brings that insight to the design tab to support product development.

DoWell Reinvented
DoWell GmbH specialises in Open Innovation, User Experience research and Innovation measurement. Companies can pivot to high growth status by incorporating users’ demands and opinions in product development, rather than neglecting user opinion as they did in the past. DoWell provides global medium-sized and large companies with User Experience research information from the field to support user-centred product design. DoWell understands the needs of global companies developing innovative products and services and provides them with reliable user information, local market knowledge, responsiveness and empathy.