(503a) Hunting for Big Gain, in the Forest of New Product Development Opportunities

Constant vigilance for THREATS to your firm's current business (from any source in the marketplace) provides a good early warning system, enabling timely counteraction.

Scanning the market horizon for OPPORTUNITIES you could address (by designing future new products) is not so easy. For one thing ? new developments and trends which are, after all, relevant to your particular company's versatile capabilities, are not readily recognizable as such. They don't immediately stand out, against all the background noise. How do you differentiate? And further ? passively perusing publicity (the same as your competitors are doing) gives your company no edge, in pioneering the design, development & introduction of the next BIG THING. A head-start helps ... in winning any competitive race.

The solution is to take the initiative, ferreting out only those significant trends and opportunities that are relevant to your organization's particular technologies & processes ... and your goals & strategies for future business growth. Just such an approach has been adopted from time to time, by most of the leading companies in the CPI in the US and Europe, to develop new products that are sure to be market successes.

The Process employed consists of 3 combined techniques for acquiring creative market insights and apt intelligence ? followed by an unusual procedure for evaluation and decision-making ? both of which connect the company's capability base directly to future market opportunities.

Opportunity Search 1)Selection of the right expertise to tap for intelligence and ideas. 2)Stimulating experts' thinking in the right direction. 3)Driving a ?meeting of unlike minds? to generate good possibilities.

Evaluation Phase A counterintuitive procedure for considration of outsiders' concepts, by the internal cross-functional team of technical, marketing & management executives.

The upshot of the whole Process is, of course, 80% losers. (You can't defy Pareto's Principle!) But that's the price of getting those 20% potential gems.

Following a realistic technical feasibility investigation, and a comprehensive market assessment, then typically about half of the surviving potential opportunities will, indeed, turn out to constitute reliable specifications for the design & development of the perfect, next-generation new product lines for your company for the future.