Q. How do you determine whether ideas are viable as products?
Everything has to be grounded in reality. We talked about innovations, trends, the needs and desires of users. But the one thing we didn’t touch on is the reality of price points, time to market, budgets. You have to take all that stuff and you have to do a feasibility study to say, ‘We’d really like a 10-inch color display with one week of battery life, but it’s a $50 price point. That means we’ve got to make it for $30.’ Pretty soon, reality sets in and some of the stuff gets tempered a little bit.
But that’s innovation again because now you’ve got to get clever. You’ve got to find ways to make a product that has a good business case behind it financially.
We’ve got about (100) people and there’s a lot of broad expertise. We also do a lot of technology scouting. Last quarter, we had 42 suppliers share with us their road maps, what’s going on with displays, what’s going on with batteries, what’s going on with buttons, what wireless technologies are happening. You’ve really got to tap into all that in order to create the business case.
That’s all part of the strategy. It’s developing the product description before you embark into the development process. Some companies really don’t do that adequately and they find out [changes] well into the engineering process, and then it’s really expensive to change it.
Q. What should be included in an initial product plan?
A typical product description is going to talk about the marketing elements of the product: What’s the price point? Who are the competitors? What might the features be? What’s the go-to-market strategy?
There’s another element of the product description that’s technical — the specs. Does it need to be waterproof? Do you need to drop it from 4 feet or 8 feet or out of an airplane? How does it need to perform? How long does the battery need to last?
Then you need the budget stuff. What’s the time to market? How much tooling can we afford? …
All those things need to be wrapped into a plan or a product description. All the disciplines get covered for that. Engineering has to do their feasibility. Marketing has to do their feasibility. Research needs to do their research. The CFO has to get involved with budgets.
You’ve got to have a facilitator; that’s usually what we call a product manager. That person helps corral all the disciplines and document what needs to get done.
Q. What advice would you give leaders on innovation?
Take the blinders off. Sometimes companies tend to get a little bit of tunnel vision and they really get zoned in on their vertical without really looking around at neighboring things — neighboring competitors, neighboring technologies, analogous devices — and looking to see if there is an innovation there. We draw inspiration from the auto show every year, because there’s always something innovative that might end up in some other product.
I’m biased, of course, but I also think that companies should, on occasion, outsource. We deal with consumer electronics, public safety, medical, and that cross-pollination of technologies and trends is all really healthy once in awhile to get your blinders off and get you out of tunnel vision.
How to reach: Product Development Technologies Inc., (847) 821-3000 or www.pdt.com
