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Services: New Product Development
It's true that ideation sessions for new product development can be stimulating and motivating, especially when the group is on a roll, generating ideas one after the next, and the facilitator is making people feel excited about innovation.

But is this all you want to get from a New Product Development program? SIT 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. To read more about how we work with you to achieve this, please click here.
The Need: Real and Sustainable Innovation

SIT for New Product Development is designed for organizations that want to:
  1. create a pipeline of new products for the next few years;
  2. extend an existing product line to new target markets;
  3. refresh an existing product (or line) by introducing new, exciting features;
  4. come up with completely new ideas for products.
The Problem: Most NPD methods don't lead to real innovation
When developing new products or services, most companies look to three sources:

New technologies (developed internally or found externally),
Industry competitors (for "me too" offerings),
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: SIT for New Product Development

SIT for NPD helps you generate those truly innovative 10% of ideas that others-working on the "faster horse" - just aren't thinking about.

SIT offers a radically different-and highly effective-strategy for NPD. We begin with an analysis of your existing product or situation. Then, we jointly apply the SIT 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. In the case of NPD, 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 an NPD 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:
  1. A list of ideas that have passed preliminary filtering (several dozen);
  2. A small number of prioritized concepts, which we will have worked together to more fully elaborate on the last workshop day, and which will be turned into proposals for development projects.
  3. A preliminary action plan for implementing the development of your new product or service.
Bottom Line

Kapro Topgrade105

PhilipsDVD-Q50

Rubbermaid
FAQ
What about our Product Pipeline? Will working with SIT help me come up with ideas for "next morning" products or for long-term ones?
 

You can have either or both. Depending on your needs, we can focus on short - term or long - term ideas, and can include time - to - market requirements as a crucial element of the ideation and ideas-screening phases.

Whether you choose to focus on the shorter or longer term products, we will use the ideas generated during the program to create a pipeline of products that you can implement. When you introduce a series of products, you can test the market reaction to one product, and respond to it by adapting the next one. Having a steady stream of innovative new products helps to keep your customers interested in your activities, and strengthens your market position.
What sort of work does SIT do in terms of New Promise Development?
 

We actually think of all our "NPD" work as New Promise, rather than New Product, Development. We believe that any new product should offer customers a new promise; but we also consider it a real act of innovation to find new promise potential in an existing product. New Promise is thus an integral part of our New Product Development programs and the process for both sorts of programs is the same.
Do you help with Strategic Planning?
 

Absolutely. We combine NPD, Problem Solving, and MarCom tools to work on your processes and products, as well as on getting your company's message across to customers. We work to ensure that your promises and products support each other, and to help you target the markets you define. The process by which we do this is determined by the specific needs of your company and your project.

In one of our recent projects, a US-based company detected a change in the way its customers made their purchasing decisions, and needed to figure out how to respond to this change. We started by examining their current sales process, and applied the SIT tools to help them redefine their strategies and modify their procedures. As part of the process, we helped them develop new products that support the new strategy. SIT helped team members to think in new and more creative ways about these issues, to coordinate their efforts, and to organize their new strategy.
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