Identifying and Addressing Needs of Heterogeneous User Groups

Adopting a need-based approach can help companies to create products and services that are preferred by their customers and improve their well-being, thus providing a competitive advantage. To put need-based designs into practice, it would be interesting to know how innovative product and service ideas can address the needs of a specific target group in a specific business domain. This paper presents an approach for (a) identifying such target group-specific need sets based on an online survey and (b) integrating them into the company’s innovation processes as part of a Need-based Creativity Workshop. To illustrate and validate this approach, we present a case study that investigates varying need subsets for two different user groups of future banking products and services in France: adults with and without families. Our study shows that a different set of needs is important for each group and reflects upon the benefits and challenges of a target group-specific, need-based design approach to leverage a company’s potential for innovation.