Does the product respond to an existing need, will customers be willing to pay the asking price? Is the product likely to be well received by distributors? In short, does your innovation have a real potential? So many questions that make it interesting to analyze your environment, to study the possibilities and to define if your innovation is worth it. Well, where to start?
1. Define your goals precisely and succinctly
As Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management said: ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Indeed, we have experienced that measurement of business activities is critical in the path to success. That is why you have to define clear goals by identifying the challenges of your project and business values will enable it to effectively address the correct sectors or fields of application.
2. Get feedback from market professionals.
When you want to develop an idea, you need to know if there are openings for it in the market, if your innovation has potential or added value. How can you obtain this information? Directly from the actors in the market concerned. Don’t request the opinion from experts in a specific field only. These experts will be enthusiastic about your innovation but will not have the same buying behavior as your main customer target. On technical subjects, an expert will tend to overestimate the technical capabilities of an innovation. Market professionals will have a clear opinion on the commercial value and its usefulness to the market.
3. Make yourself known
It’s important to make your innovations known in order to give them value, whether it be a product, a process, or even a service. A patented system, no matter how ingenious, has no real value if it is unknown by industry actors or investors who could transform a concept into a commercial success. Communicating an innovation is a major challenge for companies, involving both its image, its reputation, and its position in a market. Highlighting innovation is a way to win over consumers, and to also acquire potential partners and begin marketing.
4. Agree to forsake
The last point is to deal with failure as this is statistically more probable. You may think that you idea is valuable or appropriate, sometimes it’s not. You have one thing to do : Let it go (don’t sing along). That it is crucial to learn from your mistakes to end up eventually with a better idea intended for a more suitable market. This rebound after having failed this is what we called resilience. And there is no such thing than resilience. This is actually the most important part, since it leads to new opportunities.
And you, do you see other points to take into account in order to evaluate the market potential of your projects ?
