New Product Developmment (NPD): NEW PRODUCT -- FAST! (Ten3 mini-course: 100 PowerPoint Slides + 100 Executive Summaries)

According to Phillip Kotler, a product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a need or want. Thus, a product may be a physical good, retail store, person, organization, place, or idea.

Product / Service Innovation Defined

Product/service innovation is the result of bringing to life a new way to solve the customer's problem – through a new product or service development – that benefits both the customer and the sponsoring company.

Defining the Scope and Time Frame of Product Innovation Required

According to Peter Drucker, the following four questions must be answered to define how much innovation is required, in what areas and in what time frame:
How much longer will this product still grow?
How much longer will it maintain itself in the marketplace?
How soon can it be expected to age and decline – and how fast?
When will it become obsolescent?

Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps define new product and service initiatives within a market of technology context. They embody a large percentage of the corporate strategy and provide a degree of tangibility that helps bring together other choices in direction, technology, marketing and so forth to the surface. Furthermore, starting with product roadmaps forces people to be explicit about how their ideas translate into new products or services. It is vital for developing product roadmaps to discover assumptions beneath the selection of products.

New Product Development: Critical Milestones

Searching for opportunities, both internally and externally (spotting trends, observing people) – Brainstorming – Initial design – Prototyping – Test marketing – Final design – Manufacturing

Fast Company: Fast Thinking, Fast Decision-making, Fast to market, Sustaining Speed

Achieving and Maintaining Speed – the Key to Success

In the new economy where everything is moving faster and it's only going to get faster, the new mantra is, Do it more with less and do it faster. In order to get real speed decisions at virtually every level must be made in minutes, not days or weeks. Decisions also have to be made face-to-face, not memo-to-memo. This means that people have to think on their feet, and that the forests of meaningless paper trails and approvals – so common in large organizations – must be eliminated.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

Venture values are different from established corporate shared values. Entrepreneurial independence demands space for action and trust, while independence in a corporation implies responsibility and control imposed from above. Entrepreneurial speed demands agility, experimentation, adaptation, and rapid response in order to be first to market. Corporate experimentation comprises analysis, review, sober consideration of facts, and willingness sacrifice speed for thoroughness.

Moving with Speed: The Four Components

Fast thinking: anticipating the future, spotting trends before others, challenging assumptions, and creating a corporate environment where the best idea – regardless of origin – wins.

Fast decision-making: establishing corporate guiding principles, blowing off stifling bureaucratic structures, shuffling portfolios, constantly reassessing everything, and matching the decision to the consequence.

Fast to market: removing in-built speed-breakers, abandoning traditional visions and missions and launching a crusade instead, owning and exploiting your competitive advantage, getting vendors and suppliers operating on your timetable, staying beneath the radar, and building virtuous circles of speed.

Sustaining speed: maintaining velocity through working on your business, injecting the relentless growth attitude into the firm, being ruthless with resources, building a scoreboard that measures activity, staying financially flexible, proving the math, institutionalizing innovation, and staying close to the customer.

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