CrowdWeaving® is a finalist in the Best New Service/Product Innovation category in the 2026 Quirk's Awards. Read more →
Innovation teams are being asked to do more with less, and to do it faster. Budgets are tighter, leadership wants proof of ROI sooner, and competitors aren’t waiting around for a six-to-eight-week research cycle to wrap up before they launch. For a lot of teams, speed and cost used to feel like a trade-off. You …
Read MoreAsk any team running an online community platform what it’s for, and the answer usually starts with learning from customers: gathering feedback, tracking sentiment, running the proactive research that surfaces what members actually need. That’s real, valuable work, and the strongest community providers, KLC included, have been doing it well for years. It’s also not …
Read MoreNearly 30,000 new products launch each year, and according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, 95 percent of those products fail. Why do new products still fail at almost the same rate they did decades ago, even as data, prototyping, and now artificial intelligence keep improving? Most postmortems trace back to the same root …
Read MoreEvery year, brands invest millions crafting customer experiences and communication strategies, new service models, brand campaigns, digital journeys, messaging frameworks. Yet according to Forrester’s 2024 US Customer Experience Index, CX quality sits at an all-time low after declining for an unprecedented third year in a row, with 39% of brands declining in quality over the …
Read MoreThe prevailing “wisdom” for well over a hundred years is that the crowd is mad. However, more recently, author James Surowiecki countered with his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. So what is it, is the crowd wise or mad? Anyone who has tried to buy toilet paper in the last two weeks will come to …
Read MoreKevin Lonnie, CEO of KL Communications, recently made a guest appearance on the 75th episode of “The Data Gurus” podcast with host Sima Vasa to talk about CrowdWeaving® and innovation. The Data Gurus podcast, which began airing in February 2018, has a mission to bring listeners “a real-life perspective on what’s happening in the data …
Read MoreSince the turn of the current century, product developers have increasingly looked to new processes to improve the likelihood of a successful launch. Some of these upstream processes include market research, which taps into everything from geographics and demographics to psychographics. Other midstream processes include co-creation and open innovation to spark the design of new …
Read MoreIn the past, product innovation process, particularly for consumer products, was relatively straightforward and standardized across all companies. At that time, companies developed first-of-their-kind products. As a result, innovation was centered around simply what the product did and did not emphasize how it functioned. Companies identified a need, generated a manufacturing plan, rolled it out …
Read MoreAt the recent Front End of Innovation conference in Boston, we learned a lot from the key opinion leaders who presented their thoughts and concepts around innovation. One of the common themes was the mission-critical role of the customer. Specifically, how placing customers at the forefront of a customer-centric strategy was imperative for the success …
Read MoreLet’s cut to the chase. The one big oversight missing from your new product launch plan? Thinking that market research is a “one and done” effort. It’s not! Keep your customers front and center at all times. Engage them. If you stay engaged, your customers will, too. You learned from experience after the last launch. …
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