From Market Research to Creativity Templates: Leveraging Tacit Knowledge for Ideation

Studies on innovation and new product development have shown the criticality of the concept development and selection phases in enhancing new product success rate (Montoya-Weiss and Calantone, 1994; Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1984). In this contribution we focus our attention on some of proved determinants of new product success that we group in three main categories. The first category – product-based determinants – relates to existent products as potential source of new product ideas. The second category – market knowledge determinants– includes all the techniques and tools implied by companies to produce a thoughtful understanding of customer needs and preferences. The third category – brokers-based knowledge – refers to the contribution of external agents to a company’s idea generation phase. We draw a distinction of the different potential sources for new product ideation by leveraging two dimensions: the first one is represented by the main source for the new product, that can be either internal – as in the case of existent product – or external – as in the case of customers or brokers. The second dimension we use is the type of knowledge that can be leveraged in product ideation. We posit that the type of knowledge produced represents the key driver in explaining why some tools are more effective than others when used in new ideas and concept development. The relevance of tacit knowledge is implicit in the fact that humans know more than they can tell (Polany, 1966) and are aware of (Leonard and Sensiper, 1998). This epistemological dimension of knowledge is not necessarily a dichotomy, but may be more effectively interpreted as a continuum that moves from the tacit to the explicit (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). At one end of the spectrum, this knowledge is almost completely tacit; at the other end it is explicit and, most importantly for our argument, it is accessible to people other than those originating it. The level of codification is therefore a fundamental property of knowledge: it refers to the fact that knowledge may be organized into a set of identifiable rules and relationships that can be easily communicated (Kogut and Zander, 1992). Tacit knowledge does not necessarily mean that it is knowledge that cannot be codified. Individuals and firms can undertake processes of socialization and externalization that might help codify tacit knowledge. However, some knowledge is unlikely to be ever codified because it might be embedded in individual or organization cognition and abilities (Leonard and Sensiper, 1998; Prahalad and Rangaswamy, 2004). In this sense, the quantity and quality that can be transmitted and used depends very much on the ability and procedure a company develops to extract this knowledge. We classify these techniques by distinguishing among the different potential sources – the product itself, the customers, and brokers – and the type of knowledge used as a driver in new product ideation – tacit or explicit. After introducing this classification of the different techniques, we focus our analysis on those that leverage at best the contribution of tacit knowledge to new product ideation. In particular, we discuss the creativity template approach (see Goldenberg, Mazursky, and Solomon, 1999), as a structured way to generate new concepts within the product historic path and the company’s existent competences. We, then, explore the opportunity of market researches with specific regard to ethnographical studies that grasp and leverage the potential contribution of unconscious customer knowledge. We present some case histories of companies that have fruitfully implied ethnographical research and have been able to manage customer insights to create new products ideas. Finally, we explore the potential contribution of knowledge brokers as external partners whose role can be extensively exploited in new product ideation (Hargadon, 2003; Hargadon and Sutton, 1997). We provide a contribution to the understanding of tools companies can use in new product ideation and support our classification with examples to companies from different contexts.