Part 2 Key Concepts Flashcards
A re-look at the idea of an evolving product
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Ready made Products sources
Employees
End users, including lead users
Resellers, suppliers, vendors
Competitors, other manufacturers
The Invention industry (investors, industrial designers)
Idea exploration firms and consultants
Advertising agencies, marketing research firms
Universities, research labs and governments
Crowdsourcing
Open idea solicitation from customers
Lead users
Customers associated with a significant current trend. They are at front edge of the trend, have the best understanding of the problems faced and expect to gain significantly from the solutions to those problems.
Open innovation
Process by which a firm searches for research, innovation, technologies and products
Seek external resources to complement their own internal resources
Open innovation sources
Inventors, startup companies, university labs
How do we best identify creative people?
Find individuals that that have a past trail of creative accomplishments.
Creativity can be measured by the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) Creativity Index. Based on: intuitive-sensory, perceiving-judging, extraverted-introverted and thinking-feeling.
Creative people are intuitive, perceiving, extraverted and thinking.
Roadblocks to creativity
- Groupthink: only coming up with ideas that the group will find acceptable.
- Targeting errors: keep going back to the same simple demographic
- Poor customer knowledge
- Complexity: often believe that the more complex the idea, the better it is.
- Lack of empathy: may not understand the “typical” customer they are trying to sell to because of the different lifestyle they live
- Too many cooks: a small new product team works fine, but large companies especially are prone to internal competition for power and influence. This is not a healthy climate for a new product in the earliest phases of development.
Barriers to firm creativity
- Cross-functional diversity: diverse team means a variety of perspectives but can lead to difficulties in problem solving and information overload
- Allegiance to functional areas: team members need to have a sense of belonging. If not, they will be loyal to functional area and not the team.
- Social cohesion: if interpersonal ties between team members are too strong, candid debate might be replaced by friendly agreement
- The role of top management: if senior management stresses continuous improvement, the team might stick with familiar product development strategies and make only incremental changes. Management should encourage the team to be adventurous and try newer ideas.
Required inputs to the creation process
- Form: the physical thing created, or for a service the set of steps by which the service will be created.
- Technology: the source by which the form is to be attained
- Benefit/need: what’s it doing for the customer
Innovation can start with any of the three inputs. Concepts require at least two.
Product concept
A verbal or prototype statement of : what is going to be changed and how the customer stands to gain or lose.
Require two of the three inputs and need all three to have a new product
Four sources of needs and problems of stakeholders
- Internal records
- Direct inputs from technical and marketing departments
- Problem analysis
- Scenario Analysis
Internal records
Organization’s routine contacts with customers and others in the marketplace. Sales call reports, findings from customers and technical service departments and tips from resellers.
Direct inputs from technical and marketing departments
Minds of marketing and technical people since they have spent time with customers and end users.
Problems:
Based on someone’s perception
There is a solution given with each suggestion
Problem Analysis
Problem inventory.
Use experts, published sources, stakeholder contacts
Reverse brainstorming
Participants generate a list of key problems with the product, then group and prioritize so product development can focus on addressing.
Step one: determine product or activity category
Step two: identify a group of heavy users
Step three: Gather a set of problems
Step four: sort and rank problems
Scenario analysis
Ideal problem for us to find is one that customers or end users don’t know what they have at this time. Anticipate problems.
- Extending the present to see what it will look like in the future
- Leaping into the future to pick a period that is then described.
Leap studies
Dynamic: the focus is on what changes must be made between now and then if the leap scenario is to come about.
Static: no concern about how we get there
Wild cards
High-impact, low probability events. Assess the likelihoods of occurrence of the identified events and investigates the threats or new product opportunities they suggest.
How to conduct a good scenario analysis
- Know the now
- Keep it simple
- Be careful with selecting group members
- Do an 8 to 10 year projection
- Periodically summarize progress
- Combine the factors causing changes
- Check fit
- Plan to use scenario analysis several times
- Reuse group
How to make brainstorming work
- Mind the rules
- Number the ideas
- Jump and build: if you hit a plateau. the facilitator suggests a new direction
- Get physical
Aim for group deliberations that are exploratory, evaluative in a constructive way.
Online communities
Any group that interacts using a communications medium such as online social networking.
Can be used to gather information, gain consumer insight and target opportunities. Encourages consumer innovation.
Disciplines Panel
Assemble experts from all relevant disciplines and have them discuss the problem.
Problem-based ideation vs analytical attribute approaches
Problem-based approach is the best because product concepts found by the problem/solution route are most likely to have value for the user.
Analytical attribute analysis can create views of a product different from the usual ones.
Product attribute
Features: what the product consists of
Functions: what the product does and how it works
Benefits: how the product provides satisfaction to the user. Can be broken down in an endless variety: uses, user. used with. user where etc.
Occur in a sequence: a feature permits a certain function, which in turn leads to a benefit.
Analytical attribute analysis
Allows us to create new product concepts by changing one or more of its current attributes, or by adding attributes and to assess the desirability of these concepts if they were to be developed into products.
Gap analysis
Statistical technique with immense power under certain circumstances. Its maps of the market are use to determine how various products are perceived y how they are positioned on the market map.
Gap map
Open spaces are gaps and a map that shows gaps.
Made in three ways:
- managerial expertise and judgement used to plot products on a map and make a determinant gap map
- a manager uses customer attribute ratings to get data from users for an AR perceptual gap map
- a manager uses overall similarities to get data from users for an OS perceptual gap map
Determinant Gap Maps
May seem arbitrary and subject to managerial error, good place to start.
Attributes need to be differentiating and important. Need to find a spot on the map where a gap offers potential as a new item.
Speedy and cost-efficient, but they are driven by managerial judgement.
Based on reality as viewed by the new products manager.
Determinant attributes
Attributes that both differentiate and are important
Attribute rating perceptual gap mapping
Asks market participants (buyers and users of product) to tell what attributes they believe products have.
Based on marketplace perceptions of reality, which may or may not be accurate.
- Set of attributes that describe the product category
- Gather customer’s perceptions of the available choices on each of the attributes (1 to 5 or 1 to 7 scales)
- Ask customers which attributes are important in their purchases of products. Results in data cube.
Phantom attributes can distort analysis.
Factor analysis
Statistical technique used to reduce the large number of attributes to a small number of underlying dimensions, which can then serve as the axes of the perceptual map. Contains a set of attributes that “hang together”
Cluster analysis
Used to group individual respondents together into benefit segments based on their preferences.
Reduces the original number of respondents to a smaller number of clusters bases on their benefits.
Perceptual gaps maps based on overall similarities
Perceptions of overall similarities between pairs of brands.
Could rank the pairs from most similar to most dissimilar or rate pairs on a Likert type scale. Convert the customer data into a perceptual map.
Use Multidimensional scaling to develop a perceptual map.
Shows product position relative to each other. Used where it may be difficult for respondent to articulate or visualize.
Failures of Gap Analysis
Input comes from questions on how brands differ
Brands considered as sets of attributes; totalities, interrelationships overlooked, creations requiring a conceptual map
Analysis and mapping may be history by the time data are gathered and analyzed.
Trade-off Analysis
Analysis of the process by which customers compare and evaluate brands based on their attributes or features.
Put the determinant attributes together in combinations or sets
Respondents rank these sets in order of preference
Conjoint analysis find the optimal levels of each attribute.
Two-dimensional Matrix
Two attribute set (dimensions) are used
Morphological Matrix, using 3 or 4 dimensions.
Simultaneously combines more than two dimensions.
Dimensional Analysis
Uses any and all features, not just measurements of dimensions. Listing all of the physical features of a product type.
Checklists
Can it be adapted? Can it be modified? etc
Much time and effort can be spent culling the list.
Conjoint Analysis
Analytical tool used to assess tradeoffs.
Measures how buyers value components of a product/service bundle.
Vary the product features to build many product concepts. Ask respondents to rate/rank those product concepts. Determine how much unique value each of the features added through regression analysis.
Present realistic tradeoff scenarios.
