VT GRIFFON (Get Real Innovation Features From Online Narratives)

Virginia Tech’s Get Real Innovation Features From Online Narratives (VT GRIFFON) is an Excel-based tool for detecting innovation ideas suggested by your customers in online reviews for your products, or competitors’ products. The tool uses only built-in Excel formula, with no external code or external data transfer, allowing the development team to detect potential upgrades and innovative opportunities without programming knowledge, and without sharing data over the web (so great ideas for improvements stay in-house). The VT GRIFFON tool is also suitable for call transcripts, inbound emails, product return notes, live-chat session transcripts, social media mentions for your product, or other textual customer feedback. As long as the data is available in Excel format, VT GRIFFON can perform text-content-driven innovation opportunity assessments.  

VT GRIFFON is based on Virginia Tech’s extensive research on innovation idea discovery in online reviews. VT GRIFFON will help:

• Evaluate the innovation idea discovery maturity of customer feedback collection processes;
• Extract innovation idea mentions from customer feedback;
• Maintain a master list of innovation idea mentions;
• Score customer feedback to identify narratives with innovation ideas; the narratives most likely to contain innovation ideas will float to the top of the VT GRIFFON's sorted narrative list;
• Assess per-product opportunities taking into account the density of innovation idea mentions for each product and product-specific factors such as market size and implementation cost;
• Customize the thresholds and weights used for assessing product opportunity discovery;
• Visualize products in an Opportunity Assessment Matrix and Opportunity Assessment Table, by density of innovation idea mentions (in-review ideas and cross-review ideas) and market-value measures; and
• Visualize products by innovation mention type, on an Opportunity Assessment Radar (spider) chart highlighting which product dimensions (speed, size, capacity, noise, easy of use, etc) were mentioned in innovation suggestions.