New product development

Many if not most successful companies have a target in terms of % of turnover from new products that have been developed within the last three years to encourage innovation.

As well as helping with ideas we can help you identify which you should progress based on your wider organisational ethos and give you that objective support you need.

We can help you develop a premium product or service to capitalise on the 20% of customers that want one. A good starting point is an ideas session including creative thinking about different revenue and business models. Then we will help with filtering ideas and develop an action plan on how to progress to launch as fast as possible.

New product development is like giving birth, and like that you can never be sure exactly what you will get. Also like pregnancy and giving birth often during the new product development process the company falls in love with the product. This is when the dreaded "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome can strike. No one wants to point out that there are some fundamental flaws and the longer it goes on and the more money that is spent the harder it gets. A critical friend at this stage is vital. You need to test the idea, often by a feasibility study but sometimes just by getting the minimum viable product out into the market and seeing if people will buy it and use it.

New products have a failure rate of 25 percent to 45 percent (source PDMA) and for every seven new product ideas, about four will be developed and only one and a half launched, with only one succeeding.

The biggest challenge is to improve these odds by understanding what current and future customers want and how they will respond to a new product. Product development and design can be helped at each stage by the use of social media with its billions of users, particularly if it is linked to crowd funding where people actually put their money where their mouth is. Kickstarter has some classic case studies of product ideas that have been tested by the response they got when floated, and clearly this is a great way to get the development funded. We have been actively involved in a crowdfunding site and can advise on whether it will work for you.

We have been involved in new product development for over 30 years and still get excited when we help clients come up with exciting new ideas particularly if they are world changing