Author Topic: Reducing the risk of new product development  (Read 87 times)

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Reducing the risk of new product development
« on: November 04, 2015, 05:20:29 pm »
To avoid costly product failures, companies can integrate customers into the innovation process and ask for their commitment to purchase early on.

Companies strive to develop and produce exactly what customers want, when they want it - and to accomplish all of that with no risk of overstocks. But such a manufacturing nirvana has become increasingly difficult to attain, given customers' quickly changing preferences, the heterogeneity of their demands and the resulting microsegmentation of many product categories. Today, many consumer goods companies have been forced to accommodate smaller markets, as these niches often provide the only path to growth and escape from heavy price competition.

At the same time, forecasting the exact specifications and potential sales volumes of new products is becoming more difficult than ever. Recent studies have confirmed the problems of new product commercialization, with newly launched products suffering from notoriously high failure rates, often reaching 50% or greater. The main culprit has been a faulty understanding of customer needs. That is, many new products fail not because of technical shortcomings but because they simply have no market. Not surprisingly, then, studies have found that timely and reliable knowledge about customer preferences and requirements is the single most important area of information necessary for product development. To obtain such data, many firms have made heavy - but often unsuccessful - investments in traditional market research.

Read more at http://www.downloads.mass-customization.de/smr2006.pdf

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