Evaluate your best ideas
Once the best ideas are identified, then Sinnott has to figure out which ones he’s actually going to implement.
“The best thing is to have a really good process laid out,” he says. “Have a formula that works, and it has to be adapted to your particular culture because every company is different.”
He starts by meeting with his technical and marketing folks to figure out which ideas are most feasible and then prioritizing each on the company’s to-do list.
They first look at technical feasibility. The technical team is consistently surveying what kind of technology is available in the marketplace by attending trade shows, scientific conferences and academic meetings, so they see what’s hot, what’s coming out in the nutritional technology realm, and they keep a file on that information.
“We (get) out and we find out what’s available — what’s potentially doable technology-wise — and then this ideation process matches up, ‘OK, now we know what’s doable, now which of this set of doable actually matches up with what the consumer wants?’” Sinnott says. “What we’ll do is we’ll figure out what the consumer is asking for in general concepts.”
For example, consumers may want some sort of anti-aging product, but they don’t know anything about ingredients and scientific technology, so they’re not sure what to specifically ask for. Sinnott’s team may see something that’s rated high in the system and see a new technology that can be used to create it, so they’ll match those up and go out to model it and see what consumers think.
“The iPhone is a perfect example,” he says. “The consumer could never have told you in advance or described to you what the iPhone was. They imagined a phone that was easy to use, intuitive, very easy software, that kind of thing. But it took somebody like Steve Jobs to match up the technology plus what the consumer is asking for, but when you handed the consumer the iPhone, the immediate reaction is, ‘This is exactly what I was looking for.’”
He also looks at financials.
“When you sit down and put pencil to paper, you can cut through a lot of ambiguity really fast, and certainly your financial models are right,” he says.
“You’ve got to find something that fits your culture, and there’s so many ways of doing financial modeling. The whole financial modeling, particularly of a launch of an innovative product, is terribly difficult because you have no history to draw upon, but we’ve found ways of drawing analogies between not only similar products we’ve launched in the past but also perhaps disruptive technologies that have been launched in other industries.”
He also considers regulatory issues surrounding the product. For example, in the U.S., his products are regulated as dietary supplements, but in other countries, they’re regulated as medicines or drugs, so that affects a rollout timeline and how quickly a product will be profitable or can be rolled out in multiple locations.
“What kind of regulatory issues do you have to face and knock down to get these products into other countries?” Sinnott says. “That’s one way we prioritize — which countries will be first on the list will be the ones that have the simplest regulatory framework, and then the ones that have very complicated framework, like Canada, that tends to be later in our global rollouts because it’s so complicated.”
