Lesson 7 Overview

Lesson 7 Overview

Summary

In continuing our quest to create, vet, and deploy meaningful innovation, this week we focus our efforts on a very specific and very powerful strategy and tool for our effort: Means-Ends Chains and cognitive mapping.

Equal parts innovation strategy, research validation, and foundational marketing in our use case, Means-Ends Chains (MEC) quite literally can reveal the landscape into which your innovation fits and if it is delivering maximum potential.

While MEC is rather intuitive in concept and people tend to feel that they grasp it easily, it is a practice which can yield significant dividends from diligent effort.  It can reveal gaps in thinking between intent and delivery of the concept, which is our overall intent at this point, as we need to know if the concept can potentially fail not because the strategy/brief is unsound, but if somehow that strategy was not translated or delivered to the market.

Much like consumer research, if there is a gap in the offering, we need to be both precise and diagnostic about that gap, and equally precise in filling it.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• create a cognitive map to find strategically potent areas of white, gray, and black space in the minds of the customer;
• deconstruct ideas and strategies to understand if they reflect full Means-Ends Chains and sustainability thinking;
• identify pathways of potential interest and innovation.

Lesson Roadmap

Questions?

If you have any questions, please send them to my axj153@psu.edu Faculty email. I will check daily to respond. If your question is one that is relevant to the entire class, I may respond to the entire class rather than individually.