Ideas for You to Try

Any project or work undertaken within your organization should have the primary objective of adding to your competitive advantage in the marketplace.  This could not be more true than with your new product development.  Too often organizational factors throw up obstacles in the way of your people instead of those factors encouraging the creation of industry-leading products.  These factors can be thought of as operating on two levels, the first related to the entire organization and the second related to a project and a team.  You should look to various levels of core processes and practices.  There may be times you will need to know the right way to bring in outside resources in project management, engineering, and design to supplement your in-house capabilities for the execution of a specific project.

Techniques are available to help you view the current situation facing your business in the market in terms of the relative technical performance of your products. Knowing the competitive technological state of, and trends in, the industry with competitive products allows insight into new strategic direction for your improved and new products.  Your current investment in R&D and in training your people can only be effective by satisfying user needs while ultimately differentiating your product in the right way. This is especially important in a high growth market and a rapidly changing industry.  You can better understand the direction you should take by learning how to provide facilitation and promote collaboration of your people using a formalized process of discovery.  See more...

An important consideration as an industry matures and products become commodities is to kick-start the industry to a new growth stage.  You can accomplish this by changing the basis of competition from price and delivery to product performance in the characteristics that are important to the user.  The constraint in doing this is the lack of energy in the belief that it can be done.  If you are in a mature or declining industry, finding the source of innovation is the start from which these new beginnings of growth will emerge.  There are creative methods to help in this area.  See more...

Technology resides with people and competencies are found in practical matters and details.  They both are more of skill and habit than of scientific theory or of research papers.  Managing toward your people's abilities and strengths in a teaming environment makes all the difference.  Innovation is not just a new idea, but a new idea that has been commercialized.  Know where your best ideas come from, how to protect them when they are the most fragile, and how to increase the probability that they can be successfully taken all the way to market.  What is more, properly structured platforms of products and knowledge will allow your firm to attain leadership within your industry.

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