Innovation is a cross-functional effort, involving people from many different functions such as engineering, sales and marketing, manufacturing, and supply chain. Innovators who are the most successful overlay these functions with a set of best practices to ensure continued efficiency in new product development (NPD). Many great ideas fail in the marketplace or are not fully developed for product or service sales in the first instance. Yet, there are dozens of other innovations we cannot live without in today's fast-paced world.

Understanding the customer is foundational in differentiating successful innovations from wacky inventions. An invention might be a really cool idea but an innovation solves a customer's problem with a unique technology and provides revenue to the firm by selling a product into the marketplace.

In this dynamic thought leadership paper, we discuss the importance of:

• Focusing on the customers' needs,
• Developing technology to solve customers' problems, and
• Researching market methodologies to deliver a product or service to the customer for sale.

Several qualitative market research techniques are described to learn customer's needs, such as:

• Customer panel,
• Focus groups,
• Surveys,
• Customer site visits, and/or
• Ethnographic studies.

Learn more about customer market research for new product innovation in "The Path to Innovation: Focus on the Customer."  GNPS Premier members can log-on and download for FREE.  Non-members can Download  this detailed paper in pdf form for only $8.95, including sales tax.