Launching an Innovation Project: The Pain Points

After noting how innovation projects are too often approached and discussed the philosophy behind our innovation pyramid approach in the first two parts of this series of articles, we will now delve deeper into the approach to innovation projects. And since we have to start somewhere, we might as well start at the beginning: the pain points.

A closer look at the levels of the pyramid: The pain points

This step, which is crucial to ensuring the success of your future innovation, is often greatly underestimated—and wrongly so. Just as a new product that doesn’t address any real problem will not be adopted by the market, setting aside your preconceptions to go out into the field and identify high-potential challenges is the best possible starting point for success. A significant portion of the energy required to launch an innovation project must be devoted to this step. No one wants to spend their time or money solving insignificant or non-existent problems, especially since such problems inevitably signal a future project doomed to equally insignificant ambitions.
Echoing the first article in the series, which made this observation: rushing headlong into an idea without first identifying the pain point you’re solving —and verifying that it exists and is significant—is an extremely risky decision. In our experience, this is the leading cause of failure for startups and, more broadly, for innovation projects in general.

But what makes for a good pain point? It must be widely shared by the target audience and not derived from a discussion with a single person that results in an isolated case. That is the commonality. It must be a source of significant frustration for the user. It is the user who must feel this frustration, not you assuming that the user has this need. That is the critical nature (qualitative). The affected target audience must be large enough to hold potential. That is the quantitative nature. This pain point must occur as frequently as possible. Facing this issue once a year versus four times a day completely changes its severity. This is the frequency aspect. A good pain point, therefore, is a significant frustration, with high frequency, affecting a sufficiently large target audience to define a strong potential value that can be captured through innovation.

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Innovation Pyramid: How to Identify Pain Points?

There are several approaches to identifying these pain points, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right and appropriate approaches will ensure the success of this process, while striving at all times to maintain maximum objectivity and avoid bias. These approaches are classified into several categories; here, I will discuss only two: theoretical approaches and field-based approaches.
Theoretical approaches allow for a meticulous and comprehensive analysis of the behaviors, interactions, and personalities of users within a given domain. They offer the advantage of quickly identifying a significant number of hypothetical pain points that are not easily detectable in the field. Obviously, this step takes place prior to fieldwork, since the pain points identified must be validated by fieldwork.
When it comes to fieldwork, we find more traditional methods such as observation, surveys, immersion, and many others. These approaches must be selected carefully and carried out in a specific order and manner to avoid bias. Fieldwork is more time- and resource-intensive, hence the importance of thorough preparation and the use of theoretical approaches to optimize this phase.

Finally, a screening process is necessary to focus on those with potential. The most pressing pain points are the ones with the greatest potential for creating value. This is done by applying the criteria outlined above, as well as more strategic criteria related to your company’s business or simply your interest in certain topics.

Now that you’ve identified the high-potential pain points, you’ll need to figure out how to address them and provide a solution for your target audience. That’s exactly what the next article in this series will cover: Solutions.

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