Nov 24, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Most new products fail, and most of these failures are almost predictable, particularly in fast moving consumer markets, where the adage that “you need to be prepared to fail often to succeed sometimes” is regularly taken to irresponsible lengths.
Following is a simple 6 point checklist, developed by trial and error over 35 years in FMCG. Failure on any one parameter should be a “whoa” sign to you.
- Is the market real? Will consumers actually but it, and what will they buy it instead of, are there enough potential consumers to make the product viable?
- Does the product deliver superior value in some way to consumers that is visible to them, and capable of being communicated simply and clearly?
- Can the product be competitive in the market?, are the margins satisfactory? Can you afford the brand and channel expenditures? how will the existing category incumbents react, and what is your response?
- Can your business be competitive? Are the processes and infrastructure in place? Do you have the sales force capable of selling?
- What is the Risk/reward profile of the investment for you?
- Is the product and its service infrastructure aligned with your strategy?
Some effort in answering these questions should yield an increase in the success rate, they constitute a good hurdle in the NPD process before you go far past prototyping stages.
When you need a hand, give someone with the necessary experience a call, preferably me, but if not me, someone else you can trust.
Nov 18, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Innovation, OE, Strategy
Only in physics, in personal relationships we seek common ground, people who under stand instinctively what we are saying and thinking, and who work the way we do.
Collaborative teams and alliances of many types often fail from the start because those who join, or are “volunteered” are similar, whereas in a collaborative team with a problem to solve, you need all types, and the processes to assist the management of the group need to be a part of the consideration.
You need at least one of each of the four behavioral extremes;
- Someone who is creative, out there, not too concerned with convention and how it has been done before
- Someone who is numbers and data driven, analytical, who seeks quantitative foundations for hypotheses and ideas
- Someone who just has to complete, they like to plan, and then work the plan to the end
- Someone who builds bridges, and can assist the relationships, both internally and with outsiders
These four types will not often come together without assistance, as they are very different, they see thing in conflicting ways, but to solve a problem, or make an alliance really work and create value for all, that’s just what you need, it is just harder to manage.
Nov 16, 2010 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Peter Drucker once said that innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage, and most who have thought about it would agree.
However, in most situations, this commitment to innovation tends to result in more and more potential products and technical solutions, adding complication and cost to every business process.
By contrast, Apple does the opposite, led by Steve Jobs, Apple ruthlessly eliminates all but a very few, and then ensures that the products left on the list are done remarkably well, and remarkably differently.
In 1998 Jobs reduced the products in Apples inventory from 350 to 10, tough love that has resulted in the resources to redevelop the iPod, iPad, and iPhone, rather than spreading themselves thinly across the many products that they already had, and that beckoned.
To be remarkable, (remarkable is Seth Godin’s term, it works!) Apple has removed features, no buttons on a phone, no dials on an iPod, taking seriously the designers mantra that perfection in design is achieved when there is nothing superfluous to the functionality left to remove, rather than all that can be added has been.
Nov 14, 2010 | Innovation, Strategy
Innovation breakthroughs are rare, but the innovation that rewrites the rules of an industry is the focus of most management attention.
Most innovation activity, and the source of most value from innovation, comes in small steps, one day at a time, along a path whose outcome is improvement.
Toytota’s continuous improvement DNA is an enterprise wide innovation effort, now partially understood and codified as the TPS is the best known example, and concentrates on taking small steps, every day, that add up to a huge change over a period of time.
And as we can now see from the quality stumbles of Toyota over the last couple of years, if you take your eye off the long term, and take the short term prize, it can ruin the hard-won momentum.
Look for the trends in your industry, make them visible to the entire enterprise, and tie every activity (not just of employees, but importantly suppliers as well) to the target of achieving an improvement
Nov 11, 2010 | Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
When all the verbiage is removed, there seems to be four great challenges to effective collaboration, irrespective in my experience of the specific environment in which the collaboration takes place.
- The need to be cross functional, which cuts across all the traditional management and control structures, and can be a threatening prospect to many individuals and existing structures, i.e., the status quo is under threat, and reacts predictably.
- The openness and transparency required for collaboration to contribute demands a culture of personal and group responsibility directed by data, not by personality.
- A recognition that Intellectual Property is leveraged by spreading and usage, anathema to the old model of filing a patent, and defending it in the courts. IP has been replaced in collaborative systems by the Intellectual Capital of the group, which is not static, but evolves with use.
- Any individual involved in a collaborative system needs to engage with, and be committed to the above three factors, failure to do so by any individual can wreck havoc on the effectiveness of the collaboration.
Get the above right, and your enterprise will flourish, but whilst it may sound easy, in reality figuring out how to make collaborative initiatives work in this increasingly connected world is the challenge of the 21st century.
Nov 11, 2010 | Innovation
By definition, Innovation exists in situations where there is little information available to make an objective assessment of risk, rather than one where you can assemble a range of data to make that risk assessment.
Submitting innovation ideas to a data driven test defeats the purpose, as there will not be appropriate data available, so the effort encourages useless activity, procrastination, and hubris, even though it may satisfy the bean counters.
Innovation requires a joining of seemingly unrelated dots to come up with something genuinely new, and usually the only “data” available is instinct tempered by some qualitative feedback.
