February 2015

Are all new product ideas ready to go into your company product development process? Certainly not! For some products, the technical and feasibility risks are still too great to have any hope of estimating an accurate schedule. But other products, that are deemed feasible but may entail market risk, are immediately put into a product launch timeline and the chips left to fall where they may for commercialization.

Do Your New Products Sell Like Hockey Sticks? [Machine Design – January 2015], addressed numerous scenarios in which products do not get purchased for a number of months after their launch. This “no or low sales period” puts a drag on a company’s development culture and extends the time frame to meet a product’s financial goals.  One of the causes of hockey stick sales is not addressing the need for market development for certain products.

While some market-related scenarios are hard to avoid, like capital budgeted products that must wait for “funded years” to start, many product launches with no or low sales can be avoided. At the least, they can be mitigated.

Decision makers are much better at identifying products that need additional technology development than they are at identifying products that need additional market development.

Do Your Innovative Products Need Market Development? [Machine Design – February 2015] discusses approaches to mitigating slow market acceptance; and offers insight that this may be a more frequent concern in the next five years than the past five years.