"Sticky information" and new marketing research methods

To enable the design of new products and services that are accurately responsive to user needs, market researchers must bring relevant need information and solution information together with problem-solvers at a common location. Traditionally, market researchers have addressed this problem by designing methods to collect need-related information from users, analyze it and transfer it to manufacturer-based product and service developers. These methods have been successful under many conditions. However, they inevitably encounter difficulties when information related to user needs is "sticky"-very costly or impossible to transfer from users to manufacturers. In this paper we first show that information related to user needs is in fact often sticky. We then show that, when this is the case, it can be advantageous to shift product or service design activities to the site of sticky information rather than striving to shift the sticky information from users to manufacturer-based developers. Achieving this new partitioning of innovation process tasks will require new marketing research methods that are complementary to existing ones. Extant work towards this end is summarized, and additional possibilities are discussed.