TRC

By Rajan Sambandam

The new product development process has the potential to be haphazard because of the inherent uncertainty in the process, as well as the myriad methods available for product development. Setting up an organizing framework to identify the stages in the process, and the methods applicable to each stage, should help in bringing order to the process.

Our purpose in this article is to lay out a framework and identify key methods that are most likely to be useful in each stage. The focus here is on methods that use quantitative data collected mainly through the web thus bringing more validity and flexibility to the process along with speed to market.

We envision the new product development process as an iterative multistage process as shown in Figure 1.

This is a straightforward way of looking at the process that starts with idea generation, moves to development of individual features and then to full product development and finally into product testing. Of course, this is one example of how the process can be viewed and not a rigid framework. There has to be considerable fluidity in the system to accommodate feedback, skipping of stages, use of new methods and perhaps introduction of new stages.

Idea Generation

Many methods are available for the idea generation stage such as brainstorming, Delphi and focus groups. The basic approach is to harness creativity in some form for the development of new ideas. While there is much to recommend for the more qualitative approaches, one of the drawbacks is the lack of quantitative validity to the ideas at this stage. That is, the ideas have not been shown to have popularity in the constituency that matters – the customers. We have found that the Smart Incentives approach can provid e both creativity and validation in the same step. Respondents to a survey compete with each other to produce ideas thus introducing creativity into the process. The generated ideas are then evaluated by a peer group to provide the required market validation. This approach can be useful for generating ideas on both whole products and individual features. [Please refer to the article You May Get More Than You Pay For for a more complete explanation of this topic]

To read the rest of this article and have access to the entire TRC white paper library, please click here.