Market research

• Market research is an important skill/tool for innovation and entrepreneurship - you use it to find useful information about the market, the industry, competition, and potentially even map users/buyers/stakeholders. You will use market research in the beginning of identifying and validating an idea, as well as throughout your innovation journey.
• You can do market research through all types of channels/sources, such as news publications, company annual reports, websites of competitors, publications of trade associations or industry groups, market research done by other entities, academic publications, government sources, your interviews with experts, etc.
• Leverage the library and reference librarians to help you hone your market research skills and find the information you need. Book a session with them to learn!

Understanding competition/existing solutions

• You want to understand what existing products customers use to address their needs - they are your competition
• At this beginning stage, you want to know why these existing solutions do not address customers’ needs well, what may be areas that they do work well, what customers these products target, and how successful these products have been (are they scaled, how fast have they been growing, in what geographic markets, etc.), how much they cost, how customers find out about them (what marketing and information channels), and how customer access them (through what channels are they sold and distributed to customers)
• When you progress to or advance within the Innovation Pathway, you would want to spend more time to learn even more about your competition to help inform the design of your solution
• When considering how to craft your “Competition” slide for your pitch deck, consider the points made in this article.
• If you aren’t able to find any existing/competing solutions that people use to solve the problem you are hypothesizing, it’s mostly likely because the problem is not important enough (so any solution you create may not have enough customers who would want to pay for it), or because you have not look hard enough yet. Refer back to the Job-to-be-done video to help you think about what competition means.