Understanding the Process for New Product Development

It is not a secret that any step involved in the process of new product development and its life cycle is important. When the products are in its embryonic stage i.e. generation and evaluation of ideas, it can be categorised into different segments.

Types of New Products

There are basically four different types of new products that can be launched into the market. They are:

Pioneers
These products are entirely a new idea that the market needs but is not aware of. They have the capability of creating a new market and niche of their own.

Extensions
These products are additions to the existing product range. It has very simple changes like a new flavour or size but the product is same in other respects.

Enhancements
These products are a result of continuous efforts to make improvements in the existing products like an advance feature or enhanced usability.

Repositioned
Repositioning of a product helps to keep up with requirements of the customers.

What Helps in Generating New Product Ideas?

For any company regardless of its size, the first step will always be to get that unique and innovative idea. If you are pondering upon a question that whether you need to refresh your offerings to your customers with the new product launch, you need to come up with new ideas. Here are some techniques to get new ideas:

• Screening your product offerings and comparing them with those of competitors at a regular interval will help you to identify certain attributes that could be enhanced or a new product that is absent from the market.
• If you have a robust research and development to support you, you could easily examine the user needs with are not being catered and leaves the room that needs to be filled.
• Your research and development team can use methods like brainstorming to generate new ideas.

Read: Design Process Myths

Making a Continuous Effort to Satisfy Your Customers

Companies, especially small companies, show lack of consciousness in their pursuit of coming up with a new product or while reviewing their current range of products. This happens due to the lack of time, awareness of their niche market and customer wants and lack of resources and funds. The least a company can do is compare what strength their product has in comparison to both direct and indirect competitors. This should be done once a year. When evaluating the market, companies should always avoid focusing only on the competition and skipping the review of their own products.

Implementation of Change

While examining your customers, market, existing products, and products of competitors will help you the scope of improvements, you should be prepared to implement them. After the screening is complete, you must take steps to make improvement and start investing in the direction of it. However, before you start investing, you will have to make sure extend the research in case you feel it is necessary to get to the end of it.

These are some points that facilitate the evaluation of ideas which allow businesses to come up with new products that reach the success they deserve.