Lean Ideation

A Proven Methodology to Develop a Successful Organic Idea Well into Commercialization

Paul J. Rowean

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781644245095
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Seventy percent of all new products introduced in the USA fail and are taken off the market within three years. And these failures come from large companies, many of which are Fortune 500 and advertise with Super Bowl TV commercials. There are a number of reasons these products fail, but perhaps the most common is the lack of or ignoring of the Voice of the Customer research.LEAN IDEATION is a step by step process of developing an idea, including finding the idea if none exists, through commercialization and into the first three years of the product life.. The goal is to have a team of people help their company move into the 30% successful range on new products.The process in LEAN IDEATION was developed by studying and focusing on two key fronts: 30 years of new product development and the study of and implementation of the Toyota Production System. Anyone involved with new product development will benefit from reading LEAN IDEATION.

Chapter 1

The purpose of this book and what it can do for your product plan

It is reported that some 70% of new products introduced fail within three years and are taken off the market. The goal of this book is to get your new product to be introduced and initial commercialization into the 30% “successful” category.

Why, one may ask is the failure rate so high? The answer is embedded in a rush to market without the proper information foundation. Everybody wants to be the first to market with a new idea so the high failure rate is not due to laziness but rather skipping the basic new product fundamentals. The failure rate comes from many sources such as: FORTUNE, FORBES, WALL ST JOURNAL, HAVRD BUSINESS REVIEW, THE BOSTON GLOBE, NEW YORK TIMES to just a few. We used a Google search - type in “Reasons new products fail” and you will find 25 plus pages with about 20 articles per page explaining what happened. We like Google because they seem to have the latest articles and data having read most of these articles there is a clear pattern that has emerged and they fall into the following eight categories:

1. A high failure rate because - inadequate preparation (no research question), no Voice Of the Customer (VOC) and no burrowing into market segmentation.
2. While they think they do, manufacturers don’t truly understand their customers (when we say “customers” we mean end users) and their problems.
3. Engineering and marketing each have a view held unto themselves of understanding the customer needs.
4. A lack of clarity or a gap exists between what marketing wants for a design and the program designers view. No fact based information.
5. The less we understand about the customer the more we try to make up for it by enriching the feature set (this issue is one of the seven lean wastes to be discussed later in the Toyota Production System)
6. Lack of consensus on what to do between internal functional groups. We can overcome this issue by forming a team and giving them a mission.
7. This failure is really big- No effective method for making engineering trade offs. This is a problem that can plague new product development through and well into commercialization. What is happening here is each time a problem or issue surfaces the team solves iit by moving further away from what the customer told us they wanted and/or needed. By the time commercialization arrives what is brought to market is clearly headed for failure because it is so far off track. We can overcome this by making Quality Function Deployment (QFD) or the House of Quality a critical measure as the product is developed. What happens here is the QFD chart is available at all team meetings and should one of the five “critical to quality” measurements be off course the project immediately stops and corrective actions are put into place to bring it back to the original measure. This subject is so important that we dedicate nearly an entire chapter to QFD. More on this later.
8. Inability of the team to deem a project undesirable and explain to management why they want to abandon the project. “Killing” a product project is considered weak yet team members must not ignore the caution lights and become a statistic of the 70% of new products failing within three years of launch.

Please note in this book when we comes upon a subject of significant importance and is worthy of focus and reflection we will refer to it as the “big point”.

Management realizes the importance of new products but they are frustrated

When we sat down with Chief Executive Officers to discuss new products and how we can help them, the frustration surfaced soon after they began to speak and often took the opportunity to give us a lecture on what is wrong with development and commercialization. Here are some of their comments that weren’t directed at us but we learned a lot listening to and understanding their frustration (sort of our VOC). The CEO’s are our customers and listening to them is critical to appropriately providing our product to them.

• CEO says “We are consistently late to market”
  • “And when we finally get there, costs are off target and sales miss plan -just can’t count on them”
  • “We often release tooling before the design is final”
  • “The customers view our new products program as lackluster and tired”
• CEO says “Our engineers, while talented, have never spoken to or visited a customer about fit, form and function of our product”
• CEO says “A gap exists between sales and design engineering each have their own opinion of what the customer wants”
• CEO says “Our current new product funnel sales expectations are not strong enough to meet future sales objectives and profit plans”
• CEO says “Reading our new product launch plan is better than taking two sleeping pills”

On definitions or explanation of terms we will attempt to define as the term presents itself. For example; what is the difference between Innovation and Ideation? This is our first “big point”. After watching hundreds maybe thousands of end users react to new products we have created these definitions; Innovation is a clever idea, while Ideation is a clever idea that the end user is willing to pay more for. When the customer “will pay more for” it is called the “value add”. This is especially important if the new product is going to replace an existing product. We must make sure that we have value add so both the profit margin and the sales rise. Otherwise our new product effort is wasting the company’s human, material and financial resources.

What this book can do for your new product plan

This book is structured into segments or categories in such a ...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10