F&BA has a rigorous set of objectives, and a guaranteed set of deliverables, for our programs – which we expect will lead to actual launches of new products in the market.
The Need: Real and Sustainable Innovation
New Product Development is designed for organizations that want to:
- Create a pipeline of new products for the next few years;
- Extend an existing product line to new target markets;
- Refresh an existing product (or line) by introducing new, exciting features;
- Come up with completely new ideas for products.
The Problem: Most New Product Development methods don’t lead to real innovation
When developing new products or services, most companies look to three sources:
1. New technologies (developed internally or found externally),
2. Industry competitors (for “me too” offerings),
3. Customers (through market research, focus groups, and direct feedback)
Although all three are clearly crucial for a company that wishes to serve its customers, relying solely on these sources will not lead to real innovation.
Here’s why;
New technological breakthroughs can be a powerful source of innovation, but they are usually few and far between, and can involve extremely high costs.
Looking to your competition or your customers can generate interesting ideas, but involves a major drawback: the information you get from them is equally available to everyone else in your industry.
And while customers can of course be an invaluable source of new ideas – capable perhaps of generating even 90% of a company’s new ideas – they don’t actually innovate.
As Henry Ford said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.”
The Solution: FINANCIAL & BUSINESS ADVISORY ASSOCIATES
New Product Development
F&BA helps you generate those truly innovative 10% of ideas that others-working on the “faster horse” – just aren’t thinking about.
F&BA offers a radically different-and highly effective-strategy for New Product Development. We begin with an analysis of your existing product or situation.
Then we jointly apply thinking tools to create what we call virtual products.
These virtual products may be novel variations on the existing product, or completely new concepts.
We test these ideas by passing them through what we call filters – a rigorous set of questions and analyses designed to separate the truly viable ideas from the merely interesting.
Only ideas that the team identifies as having high market potential and a very good chance of implementation pass to the next stage.
These ideas are then clustered and prioritized, leading to the creation of an action plan for implementation.
The Results: What You Can Expect
We consider a project successful when new products or services are actually launched in the market.
But even before this stage, you will be able to see results, including these three deliverables that you can immediately assess when the project is completed:
- A list of ideas that have passed preliminary filtering
- A small number of prioritized concepts, which we will have worked together to more fully elaborate on and which will be turned into proposals for development projects.
- A preliminary action plan for implementing the development of your new product or service.