Goal 7: Creating a new online-product
- You want a new, online product to sell. It is an application, information, or both. It may also include various communication functions, either interpersonal or intragroup. It may be available on your website, company network, or other means. Customers may run it on mobile or non-mobile devices.
- You do not have an effective, efficient methodology & process for product innovation.
- You believe there is an important opportunity for your business in using emerging technologies such as
- Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
- Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
- Social networking
- GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
- Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
- Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”)
- You want a more nimble and quick process than you can do in-house.
- You want a quality product, not a quick-and-dirty one just for the sake of speed.
- You want to have a variety of innovative product-concepts to choose from.
- You want the product to take full advantage of what the latest technology offers.
- You want it to make full use of the state-of-the-art in information and communication models and techniques—especially in its communication functionality and user interfaces.
- You need clear information about customer aims that the proposed products would address, how easily & effectively customers could achieve them, & the benefits customers would realize.
- You need to know how marketable, sellable, and competitive each product would be.
- You need reliable estimates of the practicality of developing each proposed product: costs, time, technical feasibility, and risks.
- You need reliable estimates of the ongoing costs of marketing, selling, & supporting each product.
- You need accurate forecasts of each proposed product’s sales, market share, effect on sales of other company products, and effect on the company’s reputation.
- You want to make a well-informed decision, based on ROI to the company, about whether developing any of the proposed products is worth going after right now, should be postponed, or should be abandoned as impractical.
- Before undertaking such a project, you want to make sure the concept, categories of potential customers, the selected customer aims to address, benefits to customers, other key characteristics of the product, and quantifications of the amount of direct and indirect benefits, costs, value (ROI), and likelihood of success are clearly and specifically defined. These will serve as the overall business-objectives for the project.
- You want to be able to set a realistic, appropriate, accurate budget for the project.
Service D: New Online-Product Innovation
- Work with company personnel to define the opportunity clearly & accurately.
- Identify the product’s potential customers.
- Research their aims to see which the product could address.
- Evaluate their alternatives to accomplish these aims.
- Consider which aims the company is willing & able to address.
- Select which aims the product should try to meet.
- Invent a number of innovative product-concepts, taking full advantage of emerging technologies, such as the following:
- Smart mobile phones & hand-helds
- Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
- Social networking
- GIS-based maps with superimposed, dynamic information
- Convergent media (e.g., VoIP, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text)
- Cameras with dynamic-information overlays (also known as “Augmented Reality”)
- For each product-concept
- Provide mockups & descriptions.
- Show how it helps customers achieve their aims easily & effectively, & their benefits.
- Assess its competition & other alternatives to determine its competitive advantages.
- Look ahead to future competition: barriers to entry & likelihood of being superceded.
- Demonstrate marketability by showing how easy it will be to communicate its customers’ aims, how it satisfies them, benefits, & competitive advantages.
- Demonstrate sellability by showing its quality, customers it appeals to, & pricing.
- Evaluate its practicality: costs, time, technical feasibility, & risks of developing, marketing, selling, & supporting it. Include buy vs. build choices.
- Estimate its sales, revenues, market share, & effect on company reputation & sales of its other products.
- Provide decision-analysis & support to help the company
- Evaluate these concepts & choose the one with the highest value (benefits divided by costs) to the company, considering direct & indirect business benefits, practicality, competitive advantages, marketability, sellability, and benefits to customers.
- Decide whether the product is worth developing right now, should be postponed, or should be abandoned as impractical.
- Clearly define overall business-objectives & success criteria for the product-development project.
- When design & development projects are to be broken into phases according to a product roadmap, this Service (D) covers the first phase. Subsequent phases will be accommodated by Service E.
Benefits: An innovative product-concept, chosen for its costs, benefits, & development objectives
- Choose from a range of innovative product-concepts the one that will
- Produce the best value for the company (benefits divided by costs).
- Benefits: sales, market share, effect on company reputation & sales of other company products.
- Costs: developing, marketing, selling, & supporting the product.
- Satisfy the most customers by helping them achieve their aims easily & effectively.
- Capitalize on opportunities competitors have missed to help customers achieve aims.
- Stand up to future competition.
- Be easy to market successfully.
- Be easy to sell successfully.
- Be practical to develop, taking advantage of both build and buy options.
- Take full advantage of latest technology.
- Take full advantage of state-of-the-art in information & communication techniques.
- Preserve your freedom and perspective to choose the best concept, before getting down into the details of the design where you may lose sight of the forest for the trees. This avoids doing premature design work.
- Make a well-informed decision on whether to develop a new product at all right now.
- Maximize ROI and minimize costs & risks from the design & development projects.
- Get information needed to set a realistic, appropriate budget.
- Receive a detailed list of categories of customers, their aims, benefits, key product-characteristics, direct & indirect benefits, costs, value (ROI), and likelihood of success.
- These serve as the overall business-objectives for the product-development project and help ensure that your product accomplishes its real business purposes.
- They also provide essential guidance to the conceptual designer, so the next step (Informational and Functional Blueprint) can be performed efficiently and successfully.
- Obtain staff support and take advantage of company expertise through a highly collaborative process.
Comparisons to Alternatives
| Comparison of Features of Our Service to the Alternatives | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Feature |
Our Service |
Doing It Yourself |
Market Research Firms |
Ad Agencies |
Website Design Firms |
Software Develop. Firms |
| Identify the right categories of the product's potential customers |  |
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| Research & choose correct customer aims to address | |
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| Invent a number of highly innovative product-concepts | |
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| Take full advantage of all relevant emerging technologies | |
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| Use best information- & communication-theory models | |
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| Evaluate each product-concept accurately | |
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| Show how each helps customers achieve aims | |
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| Assess competition & other alternatives | |
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| Demonstrate marketability | |
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| Demonstrate sellability | |
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| Quantify costs, time, risks to develop, market, sell, & support | |
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| Include buy versus build choices | |
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| Estimate sales, revenue, market share, & other benefits | |
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| Decision analysis & support to choose best product-concept | |
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| Define business objectives & success criteria for project | |
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This comparison reflects the capabilities of most companies that outsource these kinds of work, but your company's capabilities may differ.
Case Study
The Situation
A mobile-telecommunications company wanted to develop a collection of consumer mobile-software-products for their new line of smart phones to help draw customers away from their competitors. Time-to-market was a critical factor, because many of the company’s competitors were rushing to market with similar types of product.
The company knew that its key areas of strength were that of a telcom (engineering, security, and reliability), but that it had a history of trouble developing consumer software products. They also knew how difficult it was for a large organization such as themselves to collaborate across departmental boundaries, and avoid the limitations of departmental perspectives.
Therefore, although their staff was very expert in the technological aspects of mobile products, they needed a nimble partner to come up with innovative product-concepts and lead a team through a sound, efficient process that would lead to a range of concepts that satisfied all important business criteria. We were engaged to provide the methodology, information and communication expertise, creativity, and management needed for success.
What We Did
We began by assembling a project team of company experts from the various departments that had something to contribute and a stake in the outcome. We facilitated sessions to brainstorm, analyze, assess, and prioritize ideas, as we led the team through the steps of our product-innovation process.
An analysis of the company’s market research showed that the key category of customers for the new product would be young business professionals. We interviewed such people, mined customer-support databases, interviewed retail salespeople, and surveyed publications to identify user aims that might be addressed by smart phone products of interest to them. Key aims included the following:
- To access and view files from work while on the go.
- To anticipate slow traffic on route to work, in time to compensate.
- To monitor bank balances.
- To read voice-mail, rather than having to listen to it.
- To do e-mail on the smart phone.
- To check weather forecasts.
Next, we identified online and offline alternatives available to such customers to accomplish these aims. They included the following:
- Using appropriate applications available from competitors.
- Calling up a colleague and asking them to retrieve and e-mail a file to you.
- Listening to the morning traffic report.
- Logging into individual banking sites on your desktop.
- Getting someone to transcribe your voice-mail by hand.
- Using a third-party e-mail phone application.
- Subscribing to weather alerts by e-mail from the local TV station.
On a scale of 0 to 10, we scored how easily and effectively customers could accomplish each aim using any or all of these alternatives.
Next, we excluded aims that were of low importance, urgency, or frequency for these customers, plus those a new product could not help customers achieve as easily or effectively as the alternatives: e-mail on the phone and checking the weather. Finally, by reconsidering the remaining aims against our criteria, we postponed all but monitoring bank balances, because the other aims would be far more complex, difficult, and time-consuming to meet.
This defined the customer aims the company was willing and able to offer to meet, that could be addressed by a smart phone better than the competition or other alternatives. They were, therefore, the most important aims to develop product-concepts for.
We facilitated creative design sessions with the project team to brainstorm concepts for a product/application to enable customers to monitor their bank balances on their smart phones. We took into account required functionality, platform, user expertise, languages, and customizability.
We mocked up and provided descriptions of the three best concepts: a mobile-accessible website, an application running on the smart phone, a text-messaging service provided by the company to allow customers to query their banks securely. For each concept, we assessed how well it would accomplish customers’ aims and its benefits for customers.
We looked for competing products, but found none. Although none of the product-concepts put up a high barrier to future competition, and although any of them could be superceded by future competitors, these drawbacks were not serious to the company at this time.
Drawing on what we had learned so far in the process and our information-quality maps and skills, we wrote marketing materials for each product-concept. These were assessed with the team’s marketing representative to determine the marketability and sellability of each product-concept. Similarly, the team assessed the sellability of each product-concept, considering its quality, target customers, pricing, and accessibility.
The team estimated the costs (including buy versus build options), time, technical feasibility, and risks of developing, marketing, selling, and supporting each product-concept.
The last factor to be considered was benefits to the company. We estimated each product-concept’s sales revenue, market share, and effect on company reputation and sales of other company products.
Finally, we provided decision-analysis and support to help the company evaluate the concepts and choose the best one, considering all the factors evaluated above.
Results
The company chose the first product-concept (the mobile-accessible website). We were engaged to fully design the product, which was programmed by the company’s IT department. It became quite a success. They later developed products for the other aims, which they had postponed in this first project.