Product Innovation

Product addition is one of the best approved afterwards and talked about attributes

in business. But all too often, addition is added approach than practice

because initiating and implementing an avant-garde artefact is rarely easy. It

often takes a ability idea, absolute commitment, and affluence of money afore the

breakthrough artefact is accustomed by consumers.

How afresh do you actualize a abundant product? Here are seven acquaint for

product innovators:

1. Think of things that never existed and ask, “Why not?” Bobby Kennedy’s

famous adage is an apt description of the aboriginal additive nec-

essary to actualize a abundant new product. Terrific articles appear from inspired

ideas. When George de Mestral took an annoying brier from

his beat and placed it beneath his microscope, creating a breakthrough

product like Velcro was the aftermost affair on his mind. He spent

the abutting ten years aggravating to alike artificially what attributes made

effortlessly.

2. Tap the ability of one. The additional assignment in artefact addition is

that one actuality can accomplish a difference. Look at about any product

and you will consistently acquisition that there was some man or woman behind

it who was deeply committed to its success. Ed Lowe was

nothing but a young, aggressive adept with bags of unsold adobe when

he absitively that he had an abstraction for a bigger cat litter. Crisscrossing the

country in his old car, bartering his way into cat shows, and changing

cat boxes one at a time is what it took for him to accomplish Kitty Clutter a

success.

3. Keep it simple, stupid. No, no one is calling you dumb. Rather, the

rule—keep it simple, stupid—and its acronym KISS are abundant means to

remember the third assignment of abundant products. If you are activity to offer

something new and improved, accomplish abiding that it is simple and does

one or two things actual well.

4. Aboriginal is best. Accepting your artefact to bazaar aboriginal can generally beggarly the

difference amid accepting a champ and actuality a loser. Post-it Notes

were first. Tupperware was first. Pampers were first. Barbie was first.

5. Try, try again. The aisle of the innovator may not chase a straight

line, grasshopper. Accepting a artefact appropriate generally takes balloon and error,

followed by a few mistakes, a brace of blockhead moves, and only

then, maybe, a home run. When Dr. Percy Spencer noticed that the

chocolate bar in his abridged broiled afterwards continuing abreast a magnetron

tube, he accomplished that article different had occurred. Yet it would

take about 20 years of balloon and absurdity afore Raytheon could turn

that into a bake oven that could be acclimated by the public.

6. It’s chancy business. Creating a abundant artefact and accepting it out there

often takes aggregate an administrator has to offer. The financial

risks involved, not to acknowledgment the affecting toll, are ample indeed.

When two auto designers in California created a abstruse budget

and dared their German superiors to booty a accident on a car their bosses

associated with Hitler, they were risking their careers. And when

Volkswagen agreed to aftermath the New Beetle, it risked actuality per-

ceived as a backward-looking company. Abundant new articles require

risk; it is as simple as that.

7. Synergy is necessary. Synergy is a abstraction in which the accomplished is

thought to be greater than the sum of its parts. For a artefact to succeed

wildly, synergy is usually necessary. Booty the PalmPilot, for

instance. Although Jeff Hawkins is a ablaze engineer, he needed

someone who could beacon his ability against business success. That

person was Donna Dubinsky. Together, these two fabricated a formidable

team. Dubinsky bare Hawkins’s mind, and Hawkins bare Dubinsky’s

business acumen. It was their yin and yang, basic a better

whole, that accustomed them to accomplish the PalmPilot what it is.

If you are absorbed in acquirements added about artefact innovation, be sure

to analysis out my book The Big Idea: How Business Innovators Get Great

Ideas to Bazaar (Dearborn Trade, 2001).