New Product Development For Dummies

Robin Karol, Beebe Nelson

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118051283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Economía del desarrollo

The global consumer product market is exploding. In 2006 alone, 150, 000 new products were brought to market. Now for the bad news: of those, fewer than 5% were hits, and fewer than 15% will even exist five years from now.

Written for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking for an inside track on new product development, New Product Development for Dummies offers you a unique opportunity to learn from two consummate insiders the secrets of successfully developing, marketing and making a bundle from a new product or service. You learn proven techniques for sizing up market potential and divining customer needs. You get tested-in-the-trenches strategies for launching a new product or service. And you get a frank, in-depth appraisal of the most challenging issues facing new product developers today, including the need to collaborate with global partners, optimizing technology development for a 21 st century marketplace, getting start-up capital in an increasingly competitive environment, and much more. Key topics covered include:

• Developing a winning NPD strategy
• Generating bold new ideas for products and services
• Understanding what your customers really want
• Keeping projects on track, on budget, and on-time
• Building effective cross-functional teams
• Planning and executing a blockbuster launch
• Collaborating with global partners
• Maximizing your chances for success

No matter what size or type of business you're in, this book provides you with an unbeatable competitive advantage in the booming global marketplace for new products and services.

Part I

The Basics of New Product Development

In this part . . .

I f product developers behave like the blind men with the elephant, they won’t get too far. You’ll find the engineer at the trunk exclaiming over the functional elegance, the marketer at the tail stressing how easy it will be to sell, the manufacturer tapping on the legs and complaining that his current infrastructure won’t accept them, and so on.

Developing new products takes a whole company (and sometimes even more than one). When companies take the new product development challenge seriously, they become learning organizations. They take off their functional blindfolds and discover how to communicate across internal boundaries. Employees work together to understand and share the work that they have to complete. They set clear goals and objectives for their new product development initiatives. They create common languages in which to articulate their strategies.

To optimize your company’s ability to succeed at new product development (NPD), you have to come to terms with the organizational challenges that NPD presents. Part I provides an overview of how NPD impacts a company, and how the company can respond to that impact.

Chapter 1

It Takes a Company . . .

In This Chapter

Achieving success at NPD

Carrying your trusty map of the NPD landscape

Taking an idea from development to launch

Finding the functions’ places in the lineup

Reviewing the roll call of NPD players

Developing new products that will succeed in the marketplace goes way beyond simply coming up with a great new idea, a great new invention, or a great new design. Developing successful new products is a complex job that comes with many tasks and many responsibilities. And how many different people, with how many different skills, do you need to accomplish the tasks? How about inventors, scientists, designers, and engineers? And manufacturers, marketers, and salespeople? How about heads of businesses and functions and people with finance and legal expertise? Maybe we should also include suppliers and partners, and what about customers, and . . . well, you get the idea. Instead of a village, “it takes a company to develop new products . . .”

Oh my! It’s no wonder that so many companies find it hard to be successful at developing new products. In this chapter, we give you the general requirements for new product development (NPD) success, and we look at a map of the processes that you can take on your NPD journey. We identify the players in your company who have important roles in the NPD drama. Finally, we review what role you, our faithful reader, play in your company and what that means for your NPD participation.

We hope that by the time you finish this chapter, you’re ready to order copies of this book for everyone you work with so that they’ll know how to play their parts. NPD is one game you can’t play by yourself!

The Requirements of NPD Success

Over the years, product developers have come up with a pretty good list of what new products need to do to succeed at NPD. They need to

Meet the needs of potential customers (see Chapter 4). This is probably the most important item on the list. If you haven’t identified your potential customers, and if you don’t understand their needs, the rest of this list won’t do you much good.

Use technology that your company has access to or can develop (see Chapters 7 and 16). Peter Carcia at Polaroid used to warn his teams not to design products that required “transparent aluminum.” Don’t limit yourself to your existing resources. Have an aggressive program of technology development and technology outsourcing and/or acquisition. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can develop products that require miracles in the course of development (even minor ones!).

Attract customers by being different from competitors’ products. What’s worse than spending six months or two years working on a product only to find that it’s a me-too? Be sure you know who your competitors are and what they’re up to, and be sure that you understand your customers well enough to produce a product that will delight them more than your competitors’ products do.

Be designed so that you can manufacture, package, ship, and/or service them. Long ago — not any more, we hope — engineers used to consistently design products that manufacturers couldn’t build. Successful product developers “design for X” by including manufacturers, distributors, and so on in the early conversations and the ongoing work of product design and development. See Chapter 9 for more on how to “design for X.”

Enhance or be consistent with your company’s brand image. The best product with the wrong brand is the wrong product. Your products reflect on your brand, and your brand reflects on your products, and if they don’t enhance each other they may play takeaway. If you’ve got a great product that doesn’t square with your brand, maybe your company needs a second — or fourth or fifth — brand. See Chapter 3 for a bit more on lining new products up with your brand.

Be promoted by a good marketing campaign (see Chapter 13, as well as Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Alexander Hiam [Wiley]). Don’t make the marketing campaign an afterthought.

Provide a good return on your company’s investment. This is where the rubber hits the road in terms of judging the success of a product. Product development teams and business leaders can make this outcome far more likely by taking the new product’s business case very seriously (see Chapter 12) and doing what’s needed to make sure the product hits its goals.

Having a successful new product from time to time isn’t enough. New product development is a core competency of the company that takes resources and generates revenue. To build its competence at NPD, your company must

Develop employees who can make sure your new products meet all the requirements in the previous list, and a little more.

Assign its scarce resources to projects that are most likely to succeed.

Ensure that new product projects and business functions within the company support each other as much as possible.

Moving from Product Possibility to Market Reality

Although it’s true that every new product starts with an idea, not every idea ends up in the market. The most successful companies start by exploring many different opportunities and coming up with many different options. You want to make sure that among these options are ideas for products that will appeal to customers, sell in large markets, and take advantage of the latest technologies.

When we go through the product development map in the sections that follow, we say “start here” and “go there” as if we were playing a board game. In this game, though, you can start anywhere and go anywhere....

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : The Basics of New Product Development
• Part II : Charting the Ocean of Opportunity for New Products
• Part III : Navigating the River of Product Development
• Part IV : New Challenges in Product Development
• Part V : The Part of Tens
• : Further Reading
• Cheat Sheet