How (And Why) Rival Tech Co-Innovates With Customers

If you don't test your innovative ideas with customers, did anything actually happen? Rival Technologies would probably say no-and that's why they co-innovate with customers to ensure new ideas are grounded in market realities. Speaking with INNOVATEwest, CEO and Founder Andrew Reid explained more about their co-innovation approach.

Key takeaways:

• Co-innovation is a way to go deeper on customer problems to generate more useful insights or outcomes.
• Co-innovation permeates marketing, sales, and CS as customer stories become central to organizational growth.
• Taking innovation seriously shows the market that you're willing to take a stand and help build the future of the industry.

Dave Tyldesley
Co-Founder/Producer SAAS NORTH & INNOVATEwest
Editor INNOVATEwest PULSE

Advertisement

For years, market research was an industry everyone needed, but few questioned-if you got data, you trusted the firm providing it was operating honestly.

But the rise of bots has increased everyone's sensitivity to data fraud.

While bots are worrying to many, Andrew Reid, CEO and Founder of Rival Technologies, is ecstatic; Rival Tech's co-innovation model is bringing more authentic insights at a time when truth is at a premium.

Speaking with INNOVATEwest, Andrew explained more about the company's co-innovation model and why he believes it's the future of innovation.

Innovation is what it improves

Innovation is often product or service focused-either rapidly improving it or coming up with something completely new that solves a painful problem.

In order to do that well, Rival Tech launched Rival Labs, its innovation group that specifically co-innovates with customers and focuses on real problems.

"[Rival Labs'] job is to rapidly prototype and experiment-and whenever possible, to involve our customers in those experiments," said Andrew.

One example is ŌURA, a smart ring that tracks bodily function. According to Andrew, the company already knew its customers valued both their health and collecting data to improve it. But customer research still hit roadblocks.

"If I say to you, 'Why did you buy your ŌURA ring?' And you say health reasons-I probably need to unpack that a bit," said Andrew.

Rather than planning a siloed innovation project and unveiling it to customers, Andrew approached ŌURA's team with an idea: what if artificial intelligence could help with probing questions?

Working together, the team built a feature set for customer research surveys.

As people respond to surveys, the smart AI automatically detects more generic or high-level answers, then follows up to get more insight. There are also features that help identify if answers to open-ended questions are relevant and coherent for the team, helping market researchers sift through unstructured data more quickly.

Product innovation, meet everyone

Co-innovating isn't just about solving the right (read: market viable) problems; it's also about connecting innovation to the rest of the company.

Here's what that looks like at Rival Technologies:

Product: The innovation team works in sandbox environments, providing the space necessary to identify the data safety, privacy, and other essential features required for enterprise customers.

Marketing: Customer stories permeate the company's marketing efforts, including webinars, masterclasses, and events.

"The best marketers retell the same story over and over and over again," said Andrew. "You don't even recognize it because they're doing such a good job of it."

Sales: Beyond having stories to tell, co-innovation also helps Sales identify better-fit clients because they have real data to use during qualification conversations.

Thought leadership: Co-innovation directly helps the company tackle some key fears in the industry, said Kelvin Claveria, the Director of Demand Gen Marketing at Rival Technologies.

In particular, the fear that AI will replace researchers; by working with customers, Rival can demonstrate they care about the future of the industry and show how AI and humans can work together for maximum impact.

Customer Success: Collaboration between marketing and CS leads to customer marketing-sharing how other customers are using Rival's platform so they can prioritize other clients who want similar results.

"Our customer being able to defend that subscription budget they have and saying, 'Hey, I have a supplier that's adding a lot of value, and they're really leaning in on the future, and that's really helping me feel confident about that,'" said Andrew.

A better story to tell

Andrew is feeling confident that Rival Technologies has officially entered the "scale up" phase as their tech offering is secure, global customers continually use the platform, and their product team is able to continuously ship value-adding features.

At this stage, Andrew said innovation goes beyond product or go-to-market; it's a signal to the market that Rival Technologies is serious about the future of the industry.

This mindset is crucial for overall growth in the more esoteric sense, said Andrew. It says the company isn't just here to extract value, but genuinely build a bigger pie by helping their customers achieve even more.

"We have to constantly be able to show the market that we're thinking about the future all the time," said Andrew.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.