Origins of the project: The project was born in partnership with a supplier, in another division of Schneider Electric. It consisted in developing a module, a sensor which would allow to collect informations and prevent electrical fire risks. At the beginning of the project, the high power cabinets were the installations targeted by this sensor (thus mainly the industrial sector). Our objective, in addition to the product benefit, was also to facilitate installation and to reduce space requirements and installation costs. After its launch, it was well received by the various subsidiaries and customers, despite a rather long sales launch.

In the same time, our project, with the same supplier, has developed. Based on the same objectives, the idea this time was to develop a sensor adapted to lower power cabinets, which would better adapt to the marketing and technical specifities of terminal boards, which would make us more competititve on small tertiary installations in particular.

Issue:  At this stage, we had conducted a preliminary study with another service provider to test the concept with potential customers, but the results were not sufficient. They did not allow us to make a concrete decision for the continuation of the project. The problem was the lack of customer feedback, the study was incomplete and the presentation of the concept was partial. The respondent's understanding of both the issues and the concept was not good, which biased the results. Because there was no qualitative information collected, we could not know the explanations behind the graphs and results that were presented to us. What we were looking for was explanations. We wanted to have answers to our questions. We wanted to be able to make decisions and to know the willigness to pay of the end customers, professional electricians working in the small tertiary sector and managers of the small tertiary sector. That's why we called on Reach your Market and its teams that we know well.

Benefits: The results of this study were of good quality and surprisingly rich ! The presentation of verbatim, in addition to the analyses, now allows us to better understand the interest for the product. This gave us clear and decisive information for the continuation of our project. The information that emerges from the study is of quality and quantity. The respondents were able, thanks to a video presentation, to clearly understand our concept and express themselves without bias.

The added value of this support is the analysis of the acceptability of the innovation. This information is a real bonus, which allows to understand why the project is interesting and what are the problems linked to it. The richness of this study is the method. A study with 30 potential users is a good compromise and brings out reliable results. With a volume of respondents halfway between a qualitaive and quantitative study, a method of analysis and a clear and precise transcription of the results, our project team is totally satisfied.

Finally, I really appreciated the intervention of the community platform Yoomaneo. With a precise and methdological selection of target users, we can directly extract elements from the participants' speech to use in presentations to managers. It is also a good thing that respondents have the opportunity to interact and react on the answers of others. Thanks to its method, the RyM study was an excellent compromise between cost time, qualitative study and quantitative study..

I would say that the word collaboration is the one that comes naturally to my mind. Indeed, thanks to the support of Julien and Charlotte, we worked together on the concept to be evaluated, on its formalization, on the way to ask certain questions as well as on our expectations in the project, in particular on what I wanted to get out of this user study.

Origins of the project: We developing new generation of services and applications for current and future industrial automation devices and we wanted to evaluate new forms of interaction: "in-app purchase, preventive maintenance service",..., which will allow customers to benefit from advanced connected services.

Issue: We made a lot of hypotheses about how a customer would respond to new application proposals, including how the next generation of devices might work. And so we needed to understand what the acceptability of our ideas was, but we had not yet formulated what the concept would be. Indeed, when we contacted RyM, we were in the phase where we already had some elements that could be used as part of the generation of this concept. What we were really looking for in the RyM team's expertise was concrete customer feedback on our general idea to see if we were approaching the project from the right angle or if we needed to pivot before going further in this direction.

I think that's one of our main challenges that I'm working on: we are very good at asking questions that confirm our received ideas, so I was looking for a solution that would allow me to the potential of our ideas, without being biased by our preconceived notions, with a neutral eye, to see if our way of thinking about this innovative concept corresponded with the reality of the market.

Benefits: The results gave us a better understanding of the feasibility and acceptability of the concept. I particularly liked the different feedback on the emotional perceptions of the users because again, this is something that is difficult to measure and represent on a piece of paper, so I liked the way it was represented in the RyM study. It gave us the opportunity to discuss objectively and have exchanges, expecially on why we got the information.

Finally, and from this point of view, I really appreciated the fact that we were able to benefit directly from user feedback which allowed to enrich our discussions. It also allowed us to question ourselves on certain points, so I think that, specifically for a company like mine, this approach is very powerful: an outsider's opinion on the innovation is not, my opinion is not either, but that of potential future users is !

Precision for the data part, analysis and quality results. Beneficial because it was useful for the project's continuation from a design and communication point of view. And finally relational because from the beginning to the end we were well followed.

Origins of the project: To recontextualize, Exoneo is a startup created in 2017 with the desire to develop medical and prosthetic devices for middle and low income countries. Exoneo then set itself the challenge of revolutionizing the response to handicaps, particulary for people with amputations: this became a reality with the arrival of our first product, which is an articulated foot prosthesis launched in March 2020. As specialists in biomechanics, we decided to go further by offering orthotics, more commonly known as knee and ankle protectors. The first part of the body that interested us was the knee. We made some observations about the knee pad on the market as well as their mechanisms and then we worked on the development of our own model, innovative because it implied a new way of thinking about movement and a differen mechanics on the product which allows to relieve the knee whatever the activity: walking, running ... We were at a stage of development in which we had a finished product, but where we had to find our market.

Problématique : For our second product, the innovative knee pad, the market was much larger. We all have people around us, or perhaps ouselves, who have knee pain... To simplify, this is a market with 14 billion potential knees to help ! So we needed to position ourselves and find a promising segment. 'How do you find this segment?' We aksed ourselves this question for a long time, because since we are involved in a "general public" product, we couldn't just launch it and hope that it would work, we had to prepare it. Nous avions besoin d’éléments pour savoir comment adresser le marché. It's always important to know how to address the end customers and that was a skills we were really looking for. We found these skills in the Reach your Market study, so we decided to do the marketing study with RyM, also it's an innovation that really out from what exists.

Bénéfices retirés : Avec la solution Reach your Market, ce qui est bien, c’est que les données sont quantifiées et qu’il y a une base scientifique derrière. De plus, sur le fait de pouvoir analyser les émotions par rapport au discours des potentiels clients, nous y avons vu une opportunité vraiment énorme et ce sont des méthodes qui sont rarement vues dans le domaine du marketing. Cela nous a fortement intéressés, car comme nous travaillons dans le secteur du handicap, nous avons une forte emprise sur les émotions des personnes ainsi que sur l’aspect psychologique. Donc pouvoir bénéficier d’éléments de réponse sur les émotions des potentiels acheteurs, c’était très pertinent, it allowed us to focus our communication and our marketing. De plus, l’étude a permis de sonder les potentiels clients afin qu’ils puissent voir à ce stade le prototype et qu’ils puissent s’exprimer sur leur intérêt, et sur leur compréhension de l’utilité du produit et de son caractère innovant en termes de facilitation de la vie quotidienne.

Because we had already launched a product, we believed we could apply the same methods and processes except that this product is completely different from the first. The Reach your Market study was a necessary step to gain perspective on what our product was and how people perceived it. Toute innovation a une phase d’adoption et ça, nous l’avions un peu négligé, donc les résultats de l’étude Reach your Market ont permis de revoir certains des éléments de langage et d’appréhender les freins que nos cibles pouvaient avoir juste en voyant notre produit, sans pour autant l’avoir testé ou utilisé. Et finalement, l’étude RyM nous a aussi donné des clés pour travailler sur plusieurs aspects à la fois sur le produit en lui-même ainsi que sur notre communication. 

Les suites de l’étude RyM  : Aujourd’hui, nous sommes en train de retravailler sur le produit en lui-même, car les résultats de l’étude ont montré qu’il y avait des marges de progression au niveau du design, pour vraiment faire accepter le produit par les utilisateurs. En parallèle, nous sommes en train d’établir une stratégie de communication adaptée et nous menons également une réflexion sur notre ciblage : est-ce que nous allons adresser le marché BtoB, BtoC ou les deux, car ce sont des éléments qui sont ressortis dans les résultats. À l’origine, nous avions la volonté d’adresser plutôt le marché BtoC et the study has perhaps opened up a new BtoB segment for us.

Advice for other innovative project owners: The only advice I could give is that, no matter what the innovation is, il faut trouver son marché suffisamment tôt, because it is useless to develop a product, to innovate and to go too far in the development to realize that the market is not adapted or not ready. This is also one of the reasons why we have conducted a study.