Finding Nuggets When It All Looks Like Gravel: Bringing Insight to Innovation by Susan Abbott (QRCA Member) of Abbott Research + Consulting - Presented at the Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013
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Businesses are drowning in data – what they need are the customer stories that bring it to life. This session will feature a B2B innovation case study that used a hybrid qualitative design with co-creation labs, video, an extended online community, ethnographic research, and internal facilitated sessions.
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Finding Nuggets When It All Looks Like Gravel: Bringing Insight to Innovation by Susan Abbott (QRCA Member) of Abbott Research + Consulting - Presented at the Insight Innovation eXchange North America 2013
- 1. Finding Nuggets When It All Looks Like Gravel: Bringing Insight to Innovation Speaker: Susan Abbott, Abbott Research + Consulting IIeX Philadelphia June 2013
- 2. 2 The joys of abundant data
- 3. Big data is like gravel You deal with it “in aggregate” Individual data points aren’t all that useful It will point you in the right direction But will not lead you to innovation
- 4. To find nuggets you must de-aggregate and de-average You need nuggets of insight to innovate Small pieces of important stuff
- 5. The situation: Big financial firm, B2B space Big multi-year IT project Need to look out at least 5 years
- 6. The IT development team The insights development team
- 7. Remember the blind men and the elephant? Who has relevant information? Not only the customer, usually. External professionals (e.g. Auditors) Internal staff that serve these customers Experts in systems integration Customers operating at the outside edge of needs and requirements
- 8. Discovery Labs Expert Interviews Analysis Develop Concepts Online community Ethnography Evolving plan and evolving methods changed as the project developed
- 9. Discovery labs – 1 or 2 per segment Project team in the room (no window!) Lots of interactive projective exercises Half-day sessions held in a pleasant meeting space Personal invitations extended Immediate debriefs after participants leave Tons of Ah-Ha moments
- 10. Client team and participants interacting to understand the participant’s business
- 11. A slide from a concept development session: too many ideas!
- 12. Capture moments, not meetings Stories remind people of the insights later on, when they lose their way
- 15. QRCA is a vibrant global network of qualitative researchers immersed in the most exciting work being done in the field. Need insights? One organization. One click. 1,000+ qualitative experts. www.QRCA.org 888.ORG.QRCA
Editor's Notes
- Any large organization today has tremendous amounts of data on customer activities.Service organizations often have even more, because they have operational data at the transaction level. In addition to this, there are many people with access to unique views of the customer – sales and service staff, marketing research, product management, tech support. What you have is a giant pile of data.
- Big data is like gravel – it has to be handled with shovels and loaders and trucks. The characteristics of individual pieces are irrelevant in that context.To reduce the complexity, you necessarily reduce some of the richness.You can wind up feeling that you know a lot, but also don’t know much that is helpful, because you know what but not why.
- I will make the case to you that one answer to the complexity we face is small data.It is n=1I want to tell you about a case study where this proved to be true.
- This was a project that, when the client approached me about it, was initially fabulous! Wow, what a cool project! Then you drive home from the meeting and go HOLY ****! How the heck do we do this!
- There was a large development team operating on multiple work streams. They had already produced a mountain of information and systems requirements documents.There was a group of people who were liaisons to the different product lines / lines of business – not IT people, but involved in the project.We enlisted this group to be part of the insights team.So we were running along side the big bus in our funky little car.
- When you are planning this type of project, you want to enlist as many points of view as you can. It is more important to probe the edges of the challenge than to get bigger samples. We used different methodologies to gain access to information. Everything from individual interviews, to round-tables, to an online community, to ethnographies.One of the most challenging parts of this project was the difference in size of the organization’s clients. They ranged from very large global conglomerates, to quite small businesses.We selected the industries and the individual companies in some cases based on unique challenges that we knew they had. Some of the experts we accessed we did not know we needed when the project started. For example, the systems integration experts was kind of a “maybe” idea, and proved to be a fantastic source of insight.
- Over more than a year, this was the approximate flow of the major events on the project.There were a large number of reports generated, basically one per segment per insight event. As time went along, we also needed to consider the needs of different audiences – executives wanted memo-style recaps. Those on the IT team needed a lot of detail.We held a lot of debriefs. Good collaboration was essential in making this work.
- I want to talk a bit more about the discovery labs, because they were so important to the learning. This was the first thing we did, and we ran one or two per segment.These are half-day sessions. We had 5 or 6 client representatives in the room, and 8 to 10 project team members. We had two facilitators and one note-taker.After the session, we did immediate debriefs.Let me show you some images from one of the labs.
- This is one of the breakout exercises, where people on the project team are interacting directly with the participant. In this case, they are drawing process interactions so the client can understand all the steps that they are not involved in, as well as the steps that they are involved in.You can see why the debriefs are so crucial – because there is no single record of each event – we needed to capture learning from the whole team.
- The discovery labs generated so much insight that many of the ideas the project team had were completely reworked. And a ton of new ideas were created.We had a plan to recruit a larger set of participants for a community, and wanted them to test concepts, among other things.I didn’t want to ask them for more than 2 hours over the course of the study (that did not work out!), so we worked to reduce what we needed to know.This was the ranking system we used.One unexpected benefit of this approach for the project team was this: developing the concepts into something we could put in front of a customer meant that they actually had to figure out what the concept was, not just a headline. Is it a mobile app – what does it do? Is it an add-on feature? How does it work? At the end of the five week online community we were able to be quite clear with the client which concepts were wins and which weren’t. And why.
- One of the things we did that turned out to be immensely useful, was to capture short snippets of video.For the largest of the participating companies, these were their brief one minute one to one moments, asking them to capture their conclusions from the lab.I have found that few clients look at the still video from focus groups. But this footage was used a lot.
- Big data and little data need to work together to bridge gaps in learning. One is not a substitute for the other.