LUX FORUM SILICON VALLEY
Breaking Through the Hype in Consumer Products Innovation

Breaking Through the Hype in Consumer Product Innovation 

Hype cycles drive innovation; however, misalignment between innovation investment and its consumer impact frequently occurs because the hype cycles, rather than core consumer needs, dictate innovation investment. While many companies target fads during these trends, this strategy doesn’t create a sustained business or align with innovation risk.

The result is that most companies either fail to innovate successfully or become followers of high-competition sectors, especially when innovation financing is expensive. Therefore, innovators must make better early stage-gate decisions or sift through the innovation results of hype cycles to identify technologies that can be applied today or directed for future opportunities.

This presentation aligns the status of unmet needs or product differentiation, technology availability, and the state of scalability and cost to provide a means to identify the minutia that matter hidden within hype cycles and weed out the winners from the losers.

Cheryl Auger
Senior Director of Research, Predictive Anthropology at Lux Research

Joshua Haslun, Ph.D.
Senior Director at Lux Research

The Minutia Matter: Defining the Core Jobs-to-be-Done Within Hype Cycles

There is always a grain of truth contained within hype cycles and the fleeting fads created, but the minutia matter. Innovation teams need tools and partners to capture long-term consumer opportunities amid the low signal-to-noise ratio successfully.

Lux applies a jobs-to-be-done framework to provide contextual analysis of consumer product reviews and identify pain points, joy points, or unmet needs associated with something that people are trying to achieve (e.g., a task, goal, or problem).

We will uncover the most dominant jobs in three key hype areas: 1) using the senses to create experiences, 2) autonomous vehicles, and 3) holistic body health and then analyze them for tensions, occasions associated with a job, steps taken to solve the job, and the types of products hired and fired.

Derek Gingrich
Product Manager at Lux Research

Lauren Gilhooly
Senior Anthropologist and Client Delivery and Advisory Lead at Lux Research

Accelerating the Right Technologies Through Human-Centric Innovation with Lux Research

Innovation leaders must move quickly, be on the cutting edge, and avoid the gravity of hype to meet consumers’ needs.

In this session, we evaluate the availability and scalability of technologies capable of overcoming the core unmet needs identified from three hype cycles. You will learn how to use the Virtual Research Assistant Luxer, built on research methodologies refined over the last 20 years, to rapidly surface insights and connect the human-centric minutia that matter to innovation activity that directly targets consumers as well as the adjacent manufacturing innovation ecosystem.

Attendees will leave with a strong understanding of how to bridge the results from the jobs-to-be-done framework to innovation ecosystem scouting and accelerate the innovation journey by improving alignment to unmet needs.

Ian Rinehart
Associate Research Director at Lux Research

Maxwell Barry
Client Experience Manager at Lux Research

Kaitlyn Cullen
Business Development Representative at Lux Research

Fireside Chat: Moving from Innovation Follower to Innovation Driver — Insights from Industry Leaders

Growing an innovation team that leads rather than follows its competitors requires human-centric innovation. This innovation relies on learning new technologies, skills, frameworks, and methodologies to deliver incremental advances and create transformational opportunities.

An esteemed executive within Lux’s network will discuss how they are transforming their team and their approach to consumer insights and innovation — and how they are using Lux to do so.

Moderator:

Josh Haslun, Ph.D.
Senior Director at Lux Research

Guest Speaker:

Raymond Zheng
Senior Managing Director, Corporate Venturing and Open Innovation at Honda Innovation Silicon Valley

Wrap-Up and Next Steps

Cheryl Auger
Senior Director of Research, Predictive Anthropology at Lux Research

Joshua Haslun, Ph.D.
Senior Director at Lux Research