Crash course in Attractive, Sustainable product innovation
If anyone is curious about how we think when creating products that are both more attractive and more sustainable, here’s a quick checklist for you to get started.
- Observe users of your future product. Don’t ask them. If you ask they will answer your question, if you observe you might realize that that question you had in mind would have led you to whatyou think is important rather than to what is important to the user. Take pictures of their behaviors, apparent strives and choices.
- Do a lifecycle assesment (LCA) on a product which is likely to be similar to the product you are about to create. Understand what are the big sustainability challenges and what are the small ones. Here is where you might find out that the low hanging fruit of for instance changing the packaging to a more enviromentally friendly material may or may not be a trustworthy and respectable way to make your products more sustainable. Here is where you find the hole to avoid to not be associated with greenwashing.
- Understand what changes you can do in your current production and when? This will set the frame for what or which part of your upcoming ideas that can be done tomorrow and what you can do tomorrow in order to be somewhere further down the line.
- Understand your brand. What is it in your products that makes you: You? What do you look like? How do you function? Why do you include or exclude something in your products?
- Organise and structure your insights from the user observations, the life cycle assesment, your production process and your analasys of your brand.
- Use very structured creative methods with all the collected insights as starting points to get ideas. A good idea answers to the observed users behaviors, needs and problems, it bypasses the biggest obstacles found in your LCA, it is implementable in a reasonable time span and it’s aligned with your brand.
- Prototype your concepts. Never make a deciton on a product concept that doesn’t resemble the final result enough. A build fast, fail fast approach is usually to prefer here.
- Evaluate your prototypes against your insights. And Decide on your direction.
- Make a timeline, on preferably a wall, showing when your concepts are to be productified. This makes it easy for everyone in your team to have a shared understand when a certain goal is to be reached. Even better up is to also include which insights lead to which concepts. It helps everyone, no matter which speciality they might have, to share the understanding of the underlying arguments why your concepts should exist.
- Make it happen
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