[MUSIC] Welcome to this course one of CIPD, or customer insights and new product development. I'm Bill Qualls and I'm at the University of Illinois. In course one, we have several objectives that we will try to accomplish. But overall we're trying to gain insights into what the customer is thinking through different stages of the product lifecycle. So there's two major components of the course that we will explore. One is how to identify customer needs. Are the insights that customers may be having about a product or service. And what's the appropriate stage of the product lifecycle to use a particular technique for evaluating or gaining that information? The course will begin with providing with an overview of what customers typically are looking for when they evaluate a product, especially a new product. Now at different stages as we're developing the product, the type of information that we gain will also be different, and the technique most appropriate for gaining that will be different. So in this particular module, we'll provide an overview of the various quantitative and qualitative research methods that most are beneficial for understanding customer needs at different stages of this product development process. The course will introduce you to the value of understanding what the customer experiences with your product and service and not what they just think about the product. Based upon understanding customer needs, their attitudes, how they use the product, the course will better help you to identify that new product idea or service that will potentially be more accepted in the marketplace. In the course, most of you will be thinking about how will we evaluate your performance in the course? And we're looking to evaluate two major learning objectives. How well you understand the material and then how you apply what you've learned in this class to actual business problems of gaining customer research for developing new product ideas. So we will use a series of case studies and exercises that will help provide you with the hands-on experience of using the techniques that we will discuss. Through readings and lectures, we will give you the tools and skills necessary to use the variety of techniques to gain customer insights. And to evaluate your understanding we'll use a series of quizzes. Our discussion forums to better understand whether or not you're actually processing the information that we're delivering. The exercises will also be peer reviewed so that you can have the opportunity to evaluate what others are doing and the ideas that they have. And they will evaluate your ideas that you developed, but at the same time you get to see what your other classmates are doing. So the assessments that we use in this class are basically for the purposes of helping you to better understand how to use the techniques that we're using. And then to give you the opportunity of using those techniques. So the core structure in terms of each of the module will typically follow this pattern. There will be a reading, a video lecture to discuss the reading and other material. Some type of case study that we will do either as a written assignment or a discussions assignment. And then once we see that you understand that material, you'll be asked to apply your knowledge to a particular business problem. And that will come through in term of the exercises. Once we go through the exercises, we'll use discussion forums to understand how the other students have gone through that process. And then a peer review process to better understand whether or not you're achieving the objectives that we had set out in terms of that particular assessment exercise. In module 0, it's an optional exercise, or a optional module. Because I don't know the background of everyone, we start out with the basics of understanding how to do business case analysis. So if you haven't done any type of case analysis in the past, you want to make sure that you complete module 0. Now if you feel comfortable with your skill sets for evaluating cases or case studies, then you can skip it. But I actually encourage everyone to briefly go over the material in the module 0 to see if you understand the approach that we'll take it. But in module 0, you'll become familiar with the process of analyzing a business situation. Now the business situations that we'll look at will all be centered around understanding the customer needs and what the appropriate marketing research tools that we should use for understanding that customer needs. But we're going to use the case method or exercises as a way of actually understanding the processes that we go through. So in module 0 we'll talk about why we use the case method analysis. The steps in the case method approach. And then how to prepare a written executive summary, based upon your analysis. In course one, you will have an opportunity to actually develop written summaries of the exercises and cases that you will review. Our objectives, again, in module 1, once you've completed module 0, is to identify what makes a great new product. To understand what leads to product failure will help us to better understand what makes a great new product. To identify the characteristics of a successful new product development by examining the process in which that product was developed, as well as what customer information was available to develop that product. If we have those tools in our toolkit we should be better able to understand what the customer value when they're looking to evaluate a new product. Now, customer value in this case is through the eyes of the customer, not necessarily based upon our concept of what we think the customer value. Then we develop an idea for a new product or service business. This new product idea may be the basis for you evaluating all the products and ideas throughout the course. So if you have a product idea already in mind, that's good because then you can evaluate that new idea based upon each of the courses that you take. If you do not have a new product idea in mind, we will give you examples that you use in these various exercises to evaluate the process and would still learn the skill for developing new products. In module 2, then we look at exactly what the customer's looking for when they're actually evaluating a new product at different stages of new product development. Now most firms have various processes for developing products. The approach that we'll take can be used for a service idea, a new product idea or for even if you're developing software. So we identify and describe the stages of new product development in a generic fashion but the objective is to define the customer need requirements for your product or service idea, based upon a systematic new product development research process. Given that, you'll be able to develop clear research objectives and questions for when you begin to evaluate customer insights to your new product idea or service. In the next module, we actually examine the needs of the customer through what we call the voice of the customer. The voice of the customer is looking at what the customer sees as their needs rather than us developing the needs through our product. We actually evaluate effective methods for attaining those customer needs. Our objective is to describe and understand the basic principles of voice of the customer analysis. So what is a need and how do you translate that need into a usable benefit that the customer may be looking for in your product? We'll look specifically at a technique that's called lead user analysis. Where lead users are not customers of your products, but they thought of the need for the product ahead of your customers. And then we translate those customer experiences that you gathered through your voice of the customer analysis into positive customer needs that can be the basis for developing your product or service. Module 4 then ends with bringing all of this information together using what we call a design thinking approach. Design thinking is the approach that has been coined by the officials at IDO in the approach that they take to developing new products. But our objective here is to paint a picture of how customers interact with your product or service through what we call a journey map. So we don't necessarily process how we might fit in the shoes of our customers, but we look at customers and look at how they may take the journey as they're using your product or using your service. We build a persona of your customer based upon the experiences that they've had with your product. So we're getting more details about this customer ahead of time before we actually develop the product. So that we actually end up developing the product or service for a specific customer. Then by mapping the journeys that the customers take when experiencing the product or service, we are better able to understand how they might use our product or service. And by understanding that need from that perspective, we're able to make sure we create a product or service that's different from the product or services that they're currently using. Now you have an overview of course one and know what to expect in each of the modules. So please join me for the next module as we begin this journey towards developing a new product or service idea. [MUSIC]
