10. Developing and Managing Products
Vignette: A Heinz company employee took an idea from her little girl at home in the family kitchen to the marketing department at work and a new ketchup product was developed.
Featured URL: http://www.heinz.com
Belt Buddy
How many times have you or someone you know had an idea about a new product. It can be as simple as this - It's a hot summer day and you are wearing a sleeveless and low cut T-shirt while driving to the lake. You notice that your seat belt is irritating your neck. As you crank up the music and deal with cottage traffic, you keep fretting about the belt irritation and end up putting a towel next to the exposed skin. This becomes the seed of an idea to develop the "belt buddy" - a furry velcro fastened cover that cushions the belt.
Before you can get your Belt Buddy idea to market, you see something similar in a novelty shop and buy it. It works great and solves your seat belt problem. OK so you won't get the property rights to this invention but perhaps you could help it out into a larger market. How many other people could use one of these? How would you market it? Ads in Auto Trader or a big display at Canadian Tire?
Activity
Massachusetts's Institute of Technology has a Center for Innovation in Production Development. Read about The Product Development System - http://web.mit.edu/cipd/research/prdctdevelop.htm At this site, you may download papers and articles related to product development initiatives. To do so, you will need to have a pdf file reader. With the free Adobe® Acrobat® Reader® software, you can view and print Adobe PDF files. Download the Adobe Acrobat File Reader.
At M.I.T's Sloan Center there is a project called the Virtual Customer Initiative. The interactivity of the web is enabling users to design their own virtual products thus enabling the product development team to understand complex feature interactions and enabling customers to learn their own preferences for really new products. These methods are proving valuable for identifying opportunities, improving the design and engineering of products, and testing ideas and concepts much earlier in the process when less time and money is at risk.
See demos for Copiers, Cameras, Laptop Bags, and Crossover vehicle.
Which one of these demonstrations of an interactive visual survey of product design designed to get customer feedback is the most effective in your opinion. Give reasons for your choice.
Resources:
Product Development and Management Association article: "Making Choices and Selecting the Right Provider: How Web-Enabled Tools Can Help Optimize New Product Initiatives" - by Scott Elliott, Bob Gill and Beebe Nelson - http://www.pdma.org/visions/oct01/web_enabled.html
Insight Product Development Company - http://www.insightpd.com/
Product Reliability Improvement Roadmap - http://www.productdevelopmentprocess.com/roadmap.htm
National Inventor's Hall of Fame - http://www.invent.org/book/index.html
Instructors: Optional Activities
As with all of the Web exercises, the exercise for Chapter Ten can be used as suggested or certain parts can be adapted to better suit your student population. You will want to estimate how much time is required to complete any part or all of the parts. It will be helpful to give students a suggested time frame for completing their assignments. It will also help to determine how much credit might be given for the assignment.
1. Protecting Your Product Ideas
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office provides patent, copyright, trade-mark, industrial design and other registrations to inventors who have created new products and want to protect their intellectual property. Learn and discover at Canada's Think Links. If you invented a new product, how would you protect your intellectual property rights?
The Intro Page
Famous Canadian
Patents
Sporty Trade-mark
logos
Funner than Fun Copyright
Facts
In-Line with Industrial
Design: Evolution of the In-line Roller Skate
Top of Page
2. Sweet Spot
Product Development Consulting, Inc. article: "Targeting the Sweet Spot on the Customer Value Map" from Discoveries Newsletter: Issue 1: http://www.pdcinc.com/insights/discoveries1.html
Read the article given above, and answer the following question - "Why should value to the customer, not value to the company, drive product development decisions?"
3. A Little Insight
Go to the Insight Product Development site given in the resource section. This company is a 14-year old product design and development firm with offices in Chicago and Boston. Clients include Hewlett Packard, Whirlpool, and Microsoft, as well as many other leading and emerging firms. Their award-winning team partners with clients to bring products to market quickly and cost-effectively.
Go to the following Insight online galleries to find a number of examples of product design.
a. Gallery of Consumer Products: http://www.insightpd.com/gallery/Consumer.htm
b. Gallery of Medical Products: http://www.insightpd.com/gallery/Medical.htm
c. Gallery of Commercial Products: http://www.insightpd.com/gallery/commercial.htm
Choose one of the products displayed in one of the galleries and review
it from two of the following points of view:
| Customers | Distributors | Research and Development |
| Employees | Competitors | Consultants |