Keywords: Innovation · Design · Thinking · User Experience · UX Toolbox · Customer Experience

The NI© Needs Innovation Model is a structured customized approach for product and service development.

Is it magic or a jack of all trades? The Needs Innovation Model can best be understood as a combination of various established concepts, models and maps, aiming to provide a holistic and reliable way to achieve long-lasting success on the market. The NI©Model was created to help practitioners gather and assess a comprehensive set of customer needs, thereby determining the critical areas for improvement. In order to identify customer needs and oppor-tunities for value improvement the NI©Model analyses the “Main task & the surrounding journey” that customers are trying to get complete when they use products, services or interact with a company.

The seven steps of the Needs Innovation Model are defined as follows:

1. Specify the market and the problem
2. Elicit all needs along the journey in a qualitative research
3. Quantify needs and ask for satisfaction, importance, KPIs and emotions
4. Create the „Needs Prioritization Matrix“ and determine the needs with the highest impact and value

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