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Insights and Analysis
To ensure that our clients maximize customer reach and revenue generation, The Return on Disability Group seeks to understand the demands of customers with disabilities and those closely linked to this market. Our Lead User Insights product suite is the first process offered globally to capture insights on those demands for non-traditional markets. This consumer knows what she wants - we ask her and deliver answers that shape her future experience with your brands.
Current Mandates
Focus Group - Particpant Application - Sept 2022.docx
The Lead User Model > Capturing Intelligent Insights
The Lead User Method is a market research tool that is employed by our clients in the disability market to develop breakthrough products and customer experience for their core offering. Lead User methodology was originally developed by Dr. Eric von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and first described in the July 1986 issue of Management Science. In contrast to the traditional market research techniques that collect information from the users at the center of the target market, the Lead User method takes a different approach, collecting information about both needs and solutions from the leading edges of the target market and from analogue markets, markets facing similar problems in a more extreme form.
The methodology has four key steps - that can be delivered in phases:
1. Start of the Lead User process
2. Identification of Needs and Trends
3. Identification of Lead Users and interviews
4. Concept Design (Workshop) – often delivered in Phase 2
The methodology is based upon the idea that breakthroughs may be developed by identifying leading trends in how People with Disabilities (PWD) consume products and interact with environments. Once a ‘pain-point’ is identified, The Return on Disability Group translates both the functional requirement unique to PWD and their broader applications to the core market.
Lead User Overlays > Needs and Trends
The needs of the targeted lead users – people with disabilities in most cases – are captured through using a functional model that breaks the functional needs of the market into managable and actionable ‘buckets’.
The second model employed as an overlay to the Lead User approach is a customer experience model that focuses the discussion on those factors that increase revenue for our clients. These buckets are structured to be adjusted and customized to align with the client’s specific revenue factors and optimization function.