Old product development tool

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Question - What is the least risky way of developing new products and services?

Answer - According to the Ansoff matrix, there are two least-risk new product and service development options:

• Related markets – find potential customers who share many similar characteristics, needs and wants with those whom you are already serving successfully. This is called “related market penetration”

• Adapt existing products – take another look at the products and services that you have already developed and see if you can breathe new life into them. The vast majority of the development costs will already have been paid for

Key points

New product / service development is a critical capability, especially if you want to appeal to the financial analysts.

However, as we all know, it is risky and expensive. Everyone is looking for a fool-proof process to create an unlimited supply of breakthrough ideas, but everyone may be disappointed. New product / service development is inherently more of a gamble than a calculated risk.

So what do you already have in your bag, or in your attic, which could be "re-purposed"? With some minor modification or tweak, could you bring that old, outdated, product up-to-date, extend its life, and open up new markets?

If you have worked in new product development, you will probably have noted how long it takes for an "obvious" alternative technology to kick out the old one. Digital photography took an age to catch on. Copper telecommunications technology is still fighting back against fibre-optics with the use of ADSL to compress the signal.

And whole markets can be transformed with just the slightest modification of the components. There wasn't much new product / service technology behind the budget airlines' trashing of the incumbent premium airlines. They simply applied different priorities and made some small, but significant adjustments - electronic ordering / tickets, turnaround times etc..

IKEA stormed the market by simply deciding not to bother to assemble their furniture - lower production costs, lower transportation costs, more customer value.

Take eDialogues, the technology we use for e-surveys. This started out as a touch screen kiosk technology, was developed for remote interactive learning and communications, was adapted for market research surveys, was extended to become a mobile phone-enabled checklist generator for your salesforce, and is now principally used for business conduct/compliance processes.

This tool is designed to help your team(s) think up new ideas to breathe life into the old dog, to extend your proven technology, to resource lower-risk old product development programmes.

And you do not need to run it on your own products. Try adapting your competitor's products instead.

The tool

The Old Product Development tool asks you to pick an existing product range, and then fires 46 questions at you within seven categories. These questions are designed to provoke your team into generating a wide variety of new / adapted possibilities.

You are then invited to rank those possibilities.

This tool can be bought separately here.

It also makes up part of our broader “Innovation” training e-package which comprises an e-booklet and nine of our new product / service development tools. To find out more, please click here.

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