Managing the search for new product concepts: a strategic approach

Abstract

The authors point out that there is little in the academic literature about the way ideas for new products emerge and how the emergence is managed. They have identified the main top management problem as the strategic one of achieving the right balance between resources put into new product search and those put into current business operations. To obtain more information on good and bad practice in this area they have investigated how a specially selected sample of small to medium‐sized Canadian technological companies actually carry out new product search.The research method was to ascertain how far corporate goals, organization structures and corporate values affected the effectiveness of new product search. Unstructured interviews were conducted with senior staff in the companies, during which information was sought about company goals, innovation strategy, internal relationships and how these impinged on the genesis of 35 projects.The authors found an important corporate goal spurring innovation was growth (or survival), to be achieved by using new products to dominate their markets. R&D was oriented to achieving a technical edge, though not necessarily a radical breakthrough in market driven ways. Few had effective formal strategic plans for new product search. On the whole, top managements emphasized the importance of individual initiative and commitment to get results and the necessity of open communication throughout the organization.Overall, this research reveals once more that any organization that wishes to pursue a strategy of product innovation has to build a climate which explicitly favours that strategy. Corporate strategy, itself, has a major influence on that climate. New product search requires resources and a place in the strategic plan but the extent to which it can be formalized is limited. It must be possible for new ideas, wherever generated, to emerge and gather momentum informally.

Informal Collaboration in R & D. The formation of Networks Across Organizations

“…'Skunkworks' (Quinn 1985;Peters 1988), 'bootleg research' (Burgelman and Sayles 1986) and similar concepts allude to certain informal patterns within the research lab. Managers' acknowledgement of 'climate', of limits to formalization and of the dependency on individual initiative and commitment in relation to product innovation (McGuinness and Conway 1989) suggests that these informal patterns extend into other parts of the organization. The extreme importance of external sources for new product ideas (Pavia 1991) and the trading of information amongst rivalling companies (von Hippel 1987) allude to informal interaction across organizations.…”

Consumer research in the early stages of new product development: a critical review of methods and techniques

“…Even the most technologically oriented companies use consumer research to verify that consumers will accept a new product when it will be launched at the market. Despite the importance of the later stages, it is increasingly recognised that successful NPD strongly depends on the quality of the opportunity identification stage (Cooper, 1985(Cooper, , 1988(Cooper, , 1998McGuinness and Conway, 1989). The goal of this stage is to search for new areas of opportunities, which typically involve the unmet needs and wants of consumers.…”

Open evaluation of new product concepts at the front end of innovation: objectives and contingency factors

“…C orporate innovation comprises a set of complementary activities such as identifying new business opportunities (Rochford, 1991;Baron, 2006), generating ideas for new product development (Kanter, 1988;McGuinness and Conway, 1989;Troy et al, 2001;McAdam and McClelland, 2002), selecting the most promising ideas for resource allocation (Girotra et al, 2010;Rietzschel et al, 2010), and developing selected ideas into marketable business solutions (Leonard-Barton, 1992;Veryzer, 1998). Within this generic set of innovation activities, firms experiment with various practices to bring new products and services from invention to market diffusion (Rothwell, 1994).…”