The evolving needs of customers

Customer needs and market dynamics are constantly shifting. What excites customers at launch may not hold the same appeal a year later. Competitors introduce alternatives, new technologies reshape expectations, and customers themselves become more familiar with the product category.

As this context evolves, so should the value proposition. Companies that keep their products relevant continuously adapt; not only the product itself, but also how it is positioned, priced, distributed, and supported.

Innovation after launch is therefore less about reinventing the product and more about refining and expanding its value over time.

Increasing willingness to pay

When companies pay close attention to how customers use their products, new opportunities naturally emerge.

For some products, this might mean introducing advanced features once users have mastered the basics. In other cases, improving usability or performance can significantly increase the perceived value. Small adjustments, such as simpler interfaces, faster response times, and better reliability, often make a bigger difference than entirely new functionalities.

Another common path is to expand the offering around the core product. Premium versions or specialized add-ons can serve more demanding users, while complementary products or services can turn a single product into a broader solution.

These types of innovations allow companies to strengthen their value proposition over time and create new revenue opportunities without having to start from scratch.

Sustaining the competitive edge

Continuously improving and expanding a product helps companies stay ahead in competitive markets. When products evolve along with customer expectations, they prevent customer churn, remain relevant longer, and are less likely to be replaced by alternatives.

This lifecycle approach can also reveal new applications or customer segments that were not considered or visible at the initial launch. Many successful products grow far beyond their original market reach simply because companies continue to explore and pivot how they can be used differently.

Over time, this leads to stronger customer relationships, higher lifetime value, and a reputation for staying at the forefront of the field.

Ultimately, this commitment fosters long-term loyalty. When a brand consistently delivers ongoing innovation and fresh value, it strengthens the company’s reputation and stops being a vendor and starts being a leader in the field.

Supporting innovation across the life cycle

Innovating beyond the initial launch requires a structured approach. It starts with understanding how customer needs evolve, identifying where value can be added, and translating these insights into concrete improvements or new offerings.

This may involve deeper market insights, iterative product development, refining the value proposition, or adjusting how the product is brought to market as the landscape changes.

When companies actively manage innovation throughout the product life cycle, they not only extend the relevance of their products but also create a continuous engine for growth.

At Verhaert, sustainable growth happens with grounding decisions in real-world insights. By connecting market understanding with hands-on development – from early exploration to the final go-to-market strategy – companies can build value propositions that continue to resonate long after the launch.

Moving beyond a ‘one-and-done’ mindset creates products that are not only relevant today but resilient over time. Curious how this approach could strengthen your portfolio? Let’s talk.

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Let’s start pragmatically, your primary stakeholder, the customer drives sales. A sales cycle starts with identifying a champion, someone who is convinced of your offering, and a strategic channel to reach them. In the ecosystem of your champion there is a myriad of influencers and decision makers with different motives and drivers. Understanding what their impact is, who they are, and how to address them appropriately may transform any of them in your champion – contrary, ignoring them may result in severe resistance.

Understanding stakeholder importance

The European health system is undergoing a transition towards value-driven procurement, in contrast to price and volume-based procurement. To do this you need to address the increasing cost and moving towards a sustainable system, with cost-effective high quality care for patients. This will indeed be enabled by innovative solutions. Due to the degree of innovativeness, such solutions require additional investments or even infrastructural changes. Over the last decade several initiatives led to the development of the Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) Value Based Procurement (VDP) framework. This framework was developed to allow organizations to partner with MedTech companies as part of premarket consultations – a great tool to get a head start in understanding your ecosystem of stakeholders.

Generic procurement framework for Life Sciences

The framework illustrates the complexity of an ecosystem in the Life Science domain. In the excitement of your own innovation, a common mistake is to overestimate the importance of certain performance attributes, either due to a cognitive bias or simply because one looks at their own solution through rose-colored glasses. Therefore, it is essential to start gathering evidence that you are able to address your stakeholders early on in your development. At an early development stage, you can pivot readily and ensure a successful adaptation upon product launch.

Value-based procurement framework for MedTech

Now – in some cases the ability to pay for your solution by your end-user may not be sufficient, yet the societal value would exceed the money spent. In this case, the solution should be eligible for reimbursement. This is because incremental innovation evidence can be readily collected. However, once we look at transformative and disruptive innovations, this is more complicated. In that case, you should engage in active and continuous dialogue with health systems early on in their development. This is necessary for early evidence collection and to ensure innovation valuation as described in the Value of Innovation Partnership Model proposed by Prof. Lieven Annemans.

Any questions on this post? Submit them below and we’ll get back to you soon!

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Many digital health products and services feature cutting-edge technology, however, we are convinced that technology alone does not ensure success. The starting point of these innovations must be unmet needs of patients. Transformative innovation addressing unmet needs requires a change in behavior. These changes can be nudged into the desired direction and help the user adopting new uses, new behavior. These nudges influence subconscious behavior by making the desired behavior attractive, without restricting people’s freedoms. Our framework comprises 6 nudging types.

6 types of nudging

Behavior is adjustable and is in function of a) one’s motivation, b) its ability to perform and c) the appropriate trigger to nudge the desired behavior. People react differently to nudges and thus require different triggers to institute desired behavior. Personalization will encourage them to change their behavior and hence improve engagement of your app.

Persona based nudge model

The way to develop these user interfaces can only be performed in short, iterative cycles, testing it in the market through pretotyping tools, adapting it and testing again. They have to validate both unmet needs and the willingness to adopt to these new solutions, while disregarding ‘older substitutes’. Here desirability, usability and lean user research pop in, in an agile way.
You have to validate market interest and actual use of a potential innovation, simulating the core experience, with the minimum investment of time and resources.

Digital products only deliver fundamental elements of value when the company addresses a purpose important to the user. We found that four levels of ‘purposeful’ needs exists: functional, emotional, life changing and social impact. The more elements provided in the user experience and design of the UI, the greater customers’ willingness to interact is with the brand with a high loyalty, leading to higher sustained revenue growth.

5 levels of purposeful needs

Combining purpose fit, high degree of personalization and behavioral nudging will create robust, compliant products. The only way to validate if your health app complies with the users perception is in validating as much as possible in a lean way.

Any questions on this post? Submit them below and we’ll get back to you soon!

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The innovation speed has become so high that human adoption has become the bottleneck. To overcome this challenge you need to identify reasons for rejection and adoption, and intentionally redesign physical experiences to affect user behavior. Find out more on behavior engineering in this lecture from David Pas, Coordinator DesignLab at Verhaert.

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The post Behavior engineering appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

Covid-19 has changed, and will continue to change habits and behavior, both at home and in public. How can product and service development meet these new demands? And what is the role of human-machine interactions and remote conditioning? In this webinar, Lieven Claeys introduces you to touchless services and operations.

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To overcome this, it’s crucial to understand as soon as possible the goal and motivation which needs to be accomplished and how your new technology can help in getting it done. That goes back to really understanding the so called ‘job-to-be-done’.

Users don’t need technology. They want to accomplish a goal.

We’ve experienced that when a new technology allows a medical procedure to be performed more efficiently because of a reduced process time, then ‘increasing the throughput’ should be the primary goal of the device development program instead of just more powerful hardware. We’ve learned that a brilliant technical solution to improve the quality of a surgery and so the patient’s comfort was hard to get adopted because the surgery procedure time increased and so a no go for the surgeons.

We were once invited to take part of a review board of key leader surgeons to give there feedback on a new product concept with the aim to support surgeons in making the surgery easier by an supportive tool. After the demonstration one of the orthopedists said: “I’m not going to use this tool, because I’m very experienced in performing this procedure perfectly and I don’t want to show my students that I’m using this ‘easy-to-do-tool’.”

As soon as the goal is defined, and the technology is chosen you need to focus on the market adoption challenge: breakthrough products might have the biggest potential, however they come with a higher risk too.

Peel the layers

The process of adaptation and rejection is complex and influenced by many interacting factors going from the individual (attitude) layer over task and process to the environmental layer. From our experience – supported by literature – we’ve noticed that the individual aspects receive less attention even though adoption decisions in hospitals are made by individuals and underlie subjective influencers (physicians). On the other hand, it’s clear that succeeding in establishing a positive attitude is the best way to start spreading your innovation. Real engagement can be triggered by touching the individual attitude layer.

Rationalize the irrational

Tools can help to rationalize the subjective feelings. As an example, Fogg’s Behavior model is a smart framework to review the touch points and check what can be done to achieve a goal by questioning the ‘motivation’, the ‘ability’ and by inventing some triggers to evoke a specific action. The outcome can give the R&D team insights which can be translated into new design guidelines.

It’s difficult to listen to what you don’t want to hear

But you better try to do so, because the solution for a smooth market adoption is easier to find if you have an understanding of the ‘type of resistance’. At first glance they might look similar, but the difference between let’s say the ‘usage resistance’ and the ‘social resistance’ is huge. And the solution to solve this will be widely different too.

Conclusion

You may have that amazing technology, but predicting if the user will embrace it, that’s another league of innovation. Fortunately, there are various types of tools helping you to rationalize the subjective feelings and to understand the apparently irrational behavior. But remember to focus on the ultimate user goals and the expectations of the stakeholders to develop technologies that can achieve those goals and not reverse.

Download the perspective

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Develop products that customers actually want to use

Surviving the chasm

The product life cycle is familiar to most marketers: when you introduce a new product, it goes through different stages of adoption. At first the product sells slowly to a few geeky people who love technology for technology’s sake – called innovators. Then it progresses to a larger portion of the population, a group that sees potential and is willing to deal with bugs, shortcomings and incomplete feature sets because they are visionaries. These are the early adopters, they see in fact huge potential.

The next group of people are very different than the first two groups. The early majority are far more pragmatic and want solutions for their existing problems. They only buy products that are mature, not beta products. These needs may be explicit, but often they are unspoken.

In 1981 Moore brought us a useful insight that there is a chasm or a hard stop in sales growth that, in most cases, kills innovations. Why? It’s a legitimate question, but even more relevant in my opinion is how we can overcome as product developers. It’s clear that the ones conceiving new products may have a vast impact on overcoming this problem.

Do people say what they do?

What’s in fact beyond the product life cycle? What motivations and needs do they have? Are there any distinctive differences between innovators, early adopters and the early majority in terms of requirements? And what provides the baseline for these changing requirements? In product development it doesn’t make sense to look at market geographies or financials nor on market conditions. It makes much more sense to look at people. In essence we look at how people (intent to) behave because poor understanding of customer needs and motivations leads to a bad connection with users and often to undifferentiated products. Product failure is glimpsing around the corner.

Developers look often to unmet needs. Or needs we know they exist and are addressed by others but might have an improved execution. Breakthrough innovators seek needs that have not been identified yet, let’s say unarticulated needs. Very challenging if we need to avoid the chasm.

People are the means to discover value

Value has become the new mantra during the 00’s. While the 70’s were about technology and the 90’s about experiences and putting people in the center of gravity, the noughties have become the socially led innovation era. Analyzing the daily life hence gained importance to connect products, services and more in general new value propositions with users. What makes sense to them has become the obvious question.

Looking out for sustainable growth means we have to understand the motivations and needs of multiple user groups. – Dany Robberecht, Director Consulting Office at Verhaert Masters in Innovation

How to analyze everyday life? Thinking in practices helps, a set of activities, routines, habits or daily chores for which R&D teams need to build a deep understanding. They need to understand these practices or jobs-to-be-done, the underlying motivations and needs, who is involved and what competences are needed to execute them successfully. Design teams in fact dive into the various jobs people try to do and into the processes to execute them. The tricky thing is that practices have become a nexus of many people and products. While people and products have become a nexus of many practices. Practices emerge and reproduce. After they reproduce they disintegrate: like any product or feature practices have a life cycle as well. Early stage recognition of opportunities for new emerging practices have become extremely important for leading innovators in designing new product and service systems.

Distinctive features create value add

Successful products and services have distinctive features compared to other value propositions in the market. Nowadays consumers seek at high pace meaningful products that make it easy to perform their jobs. The better researchers and developers connect with these jobs, by identifying and translating them into well executed functions and processes, the more triumph comes your way.

I can get no satisfaction

Users connect with each other. They turn to new services and work around the system. Their expectations are crossing industries and they make their own choices. The world has become more complex than ever before, making innovation more challenging and unpredictable. Most importantly it’s easy to loose connection with your audience. What can you do? It’s not about pushing more of what you have. It’s about how you connect with your customers and how they connect to each other.

The challenge is to find out what your customers really care about. Excelling products have distinctive features appreciated by users and result in a higher willingness to pay.

Useful insights are often found with extreme users, being non-users and intensive users. Non-users outline obvious objections and provide meaningful insights in novel (unserved) jobs or other ways they found to fulfill the jobs you try to accomplish.

Intensive users tend to be never satisfied seeking more ways to use your products and services. Insights on underserved jobs are very likely to surface when targeting this user group.

How user centric do you need to become?

We all talk about our users, but how well do we know them? Likewise innovation, user centricity comes in different flavors. There are still plenty of companies that make products that work well, but lack focus on users. From an innovation perspective this is obviously a problem. At second, we find organizations that secure the cognitive ergonomics or more in general the usability and convenience of products, hence make sure they avoid misuse and unintended use. Behavior is merely geared to the human factors. Growing into user centricity leads to companies seeking unprecedented experiences resulting into a unique perception within the market. At this point the x-factor becomes a discriminator creating a fan base among users. Eventually it progresses to companies that intend to change the behavior of people. Many innovative start-ups are active in this field of play.

The user centricity ladder indicates the thinking, strategy and objectives beyond, but also illustrates the skills and resources needed to meet a growing need in understanding your users.

Many of us who want to create a new world with breakthrough innovations (e.g. smart homes, smart cities, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart energy, smart health or smart industries) face the challenge of more rapid user adoption. Breakthrough technology often needs breakthrough user concepts to become adopted more quickly.

During our Innovation Day 2017 we organized a survey on how user centered participants are, what abilities they consider important and how they in fact perform on these competences. It’s clear that new competencies emerge as you progress throughout the ladder.

Looking at the entire journey of your customers can create a meaningful role for your service – Dany Robberecht, Director Consulting Office at Verhaert Masters in Innovation

Download the perspective to read more on design rules that beat conservatism

• Engineering behavioral change
• 7 rules in designing change
  1. Stop telling them
  2. Seek user growth through game changers
  3. Start with simple behavior
  4. Allow technology to support you
  5. Create magnets with cognitive design
  6. Built in behavioral economics
  7. Find others that benefit and enforce
• A model based approach

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