FIVE KEY PRACTICES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE SUCCESSFUL DEVELOPMENT
• Commitment of senior management
• Clear and stable vision
• Improvisation
• Information Exchange
• Collaboration under pressure
COMMITMENT OF SENIOR MANAGEMENT
• Teams that developed blockbusters had the full support cooperation from senior management.
• The senior managers functioned as sponsors for the project and took on an active and intimate role.
CLEAR AND STABLE VISION
• Project pillars
• These pillars are the key requirements, or ‘must haves’ for the new product.
• Mission awareness is a strong predictor the success of R&D projects.
IMPROVISATION
• Nobody is so brilliant that they can see the end product from the beginning.
• It’s more like having a dialogue with the product - in trying to get the end results you may ditch what you’ve done and try something else.
INFORMATION EXCHANGE
• Many blockbuster outcomes require the use of crossfunctional teams.
• Exchanging information openly and clearly on a crossfunctional team can be challenging to say the least.
COLLABORATION UNDER PRESSURE
• The development teams are generally cross-functional, but must also often deal with outsiders to bring in new
prospective or expertise.
• Collaboration in the face of conflicting functions and other sources of internal and external pressure requires a number of facilitating factors.
INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY AND MARKETING ON COMMERCIALIZATION
• Many of standard marketing tools and techniques are of limited utility for the new product
• Before applying the standard marketing techniques, we must have a clear idea of the maturity of technologies and markets.
TECHNOLOGY&MARKET MATURITY
• Differentiated. Most innovations consist of the improved use of existing technologies to meet a known customer need.
Products and services are differentiated on the basis of packaging, pricing, and support.
• Architectural. Existing technologies are applied or combined to create novel products or services, or new applications. Competition is based on serving specific market niches and on close relations with customers. Innovation typically originates or is in collaboration with potential users.
• Technological. Novel technologies are developed which satisfy known customer needs. Such products and services compete on the basis of performance, rather than price or quality. Innovation is mainly driven by developers.
• Complex. Both technologies and markets are novel, and coevolve. In this case, there is no clearly defined use of a new technology, but over time developers work with lead users to create new applications
DIFFERENTIATING PRODUCTS
• Differentiation measures the degree to which competitors differ from one another in a specific market.
• High relative quality is associated with a high return on sales.
• Good value is associated with increased market share. High quality at low price represents good value.
• Product differentiation is associated with profitability. Differentiation is defined in terms of how competitors differ from each other within a particular product segments