Challenge

My team and I were responsible to develop a new innovative product. My company produce vacuum cleaners a  large part of our market is dominated by east Asia companies that respect our Italian companies have low  manufacturing costs that can permit to sell they products a very competitive price respect of our products.

What we are trying since the last ten years is to improve our quality and the mean time to reduce the cost, but  with this police we are not gaining parts of the market.

What we have decide is to develop a new innovative product in order to generate a value added respect the  other product that are in the market, in order to increase our sales.

Until now the develop of new product process is not very structured and the innovation are only in reducing of  energy consumption, reduce the assembly time and plastic part cost.

To change this, we have created a new process of product development, we have start understanding the  market, who are our customer, what the market offer and how to really understand the needs of our target  customer.

We start “living” with our customer. We have select some people, that could be our potential target based of  the personas that we have identify as our potential customer.

We have follow these people during they daily cleaning activities and we have made some interview and focus  groups.

What we have understand during this analysis was that we were losing something, some actions, habit during  the cleanings activities, and all the considerations about the customer experience were filtered by the point of  view of the marketing assistants the only person that was living the experience with the customer.

Another problem was that since the firsts ideas, to really understand how traduce it in a product, we created a  model of the product with software, but this reduced our flexibility and increased the necessary time to see in  practice our ideas.

Selection

Due these last considerations we understand that what we need more visualization tools, like photos, video,  drawing etc. in order to better capture every moment of the customer experience, to permit to share this  experience with all the team, to be efficient and flexible in creation of models from our ideas.

What we need is something totally different respect the past process of development, more flexibility and  velocity in the creation of concepts (till now for every idea we were creating some CAD models, operations that  needs at least 2 working day). Thanks to the simply drawing of the concept now by a pencil, we experiment in  few minute something, the creation process now is very quick and flexible to the changes

With video and photos all the team can do the experience with the customers. In the brainstorming session  these video and photos can be shared with the group, and help us to generate more shared ideas form what  we view in customer journey experience.

Application

The first application of these principals was taking picture and videos of the customer during their daily  activities, thanks to this we were able to understand better understand the customer experience to se  something that the marketing assistant didn’t saw living with the customer the experience

The second step was draw every idea of a new vacuum cleaners and attach it and wall during the brainstorming  for the creation of concepts, some additional feature was draw on post it and attached and the draw. Thank to  these models we were able to choose from different model the best 3 that we had model with the CAD  software.

With the CAD models we have present the new model to a focus group of our customers and to president of  the company. Thanks to this we have also evaluate the feasibility of the model from the manufacturing point of  view.

Finally, thanks to the customer suggestion, the feasibility analysis and the president approbation we have  select the prototype that had realized, and with the customer suggestion we have made some modification of  the original model.

We realize the prototype and after a test with the costumers we start the production

Insight

Thanks to design thinking, we really understand the customer needs, we create a totally different product. We  use the visualization tools during all the process. The photos and the video have made possible to better  analyze the customer journey, and some features about we never think before that can add value for the  customer. Drawing all our ideas we could analyze more models like never before the simplicity and flexibility of  this approach permit to evaluate all the ideas not only what sound good and simply makeable from  manufacturing point of view.

Challenge

I and me was encharge to develop a new product. My company produce aspirapolveri, the current market is  dominated by companies of east Asian countries with low cost prdocution and assembly. In contrast with this  situation we need to develpe a very innovative product. Until now the product innovation was simple a  increase of performance of aspiratore motor or the energy consumption what we need is totally different  approach

Selection

After an analysis of the mark

