Customer Access
Businesses looking to grow need to be able to engage and obtain feedback on new products and services from potential customers. However, reaching those customers is difficult during a company’s startup phase as your resources and reach are limited. Therefore, you need all the support you can get in getting your initial ideas, and later prototypes and initial product versions, in front of potential clients.
That is something the Innovation Center can help you with. They can handle the legwork of building relationships with local universities, industrial players, professional associations, and government officials. Their startups and small businesses can then leverage their industry reputation to help them get established.
One of the hardest things today in today’s market is to stand out. In the book Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, author Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about how difficult it is for a company to reach their intended audience over all the “noise” the audience encounters on a daily basis. They call out that “[t]he per-capita consumption of advertising in America today is $376.62 a year. (That compares with $16.87 in the rest of the world.)” And they note that “[i]n a typical year, the 1500 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange introduce more than 5,000 ‘significant’ new products. …Not to mention the millions of products and services marketed by America’s 5 million other corporations.”
But the thing is, this book was initially published in 1981! That means, that all of those figures are out of date by over 3 decades. With the advent of smartphones, social media, apps that track our every move, and all the data that companies now have to target specific sub-categories of customers – the challenge of being heard or being seen has only increased exponentially.
And it’s a problem that an Innovation Center should help you with.
Market Research / Market Data
The challenge here is not that there isn’t any market research or market data available – it is that there is too much market research and market data available. This gluten makes it difficult for entrepreneurs to know:
- what sources to trust
- what sources are accurate and timely
- what data is important
Let alone – actually using that data to get the information they need. In fact, these are the very challenges that drove us to develop our Maryland Insights tool. And it is not unreasonable for you to expect your Innovation Center to help you with that.
If I were considering joining an Innovation Center, I would not be afraid to ask about any data, tools, or reports that they will make available to me. Those tools need to provide accurate and timely insights into both the local and national perspective; including socio-economic characteristics, demographics, workforce, and population health. This data, combined with proximity to customers and networking available through the Innovation Center, should make the price of admission worthwhile.