New Product Development: Gaining and Using Market Insight

Published by: American Productivity & Quality Center

Published: Jun. 5, 2001 - 92 Pages

Table of Contents

• 3M Corporation
• Johnson & Johnson
• Maytag Corporation
• Motorola Inc.
• Xerox Corporation

Abstract

KEY FINDINGS

• Senior management must demonstrate a commitment to creating a learning organization and promote the idea that customer knowledge drives innovation.
Furthermore, product developers require a clear understanding of the connection between corporate strategy and product development initiatives.
• Cross-functional teams are the best way to create market insight because of the diverse viewpoints of team members. At a minimum, a marketer and a technology expert should join the process of exploring customer needs. Successful teams spend time interacting with customers in their environments in order to identify unarticulated needs.
• Market insight influences the entire product development process, not just idea generation.
• Integrating market knowledge with technology competencies ensures that new products are designed, produced, and launched with a sound understanding of the market. However, because markets are dynamic, insight must be refreshed during the process from concept to launch.
• The role of the corporate market research department is amplified beyond providing data. As team members and facilitators, market researchers prepare other members for immersion into the customer environment and guide team members by interpreting their experiences. Best-practice market research departments approach their work from more of a consultative than analytical perspective.
• Training cross-functional teams on market insight methods is crucial to success.
Best practice in this area is to require basic education on market research techniques, with additional training and facilitation for product developers on an as-needed basis.
• No single technique is best to create market insight. The results of this study suggest that using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods yields maximum knowledge. Market insight comes as part of a process of exploring and defining opportunities by the product development team. Other types of information gathered in this process are technology landscapes, competitive analyses, and trends analyses.
• The knowledge created by the various team efforts is a valuable resource of the corporation and should be managed accordingly. Best-practice organizations have knowledge management systems in place to access both the tacit knowledge of team members and their documented findings.
• Best-practice organizations believe that market insight improves productivity and profitability, helps bring the best ideas forward, and makes it easier to recognize high-potential concepts. As such, market insight can increase speed to profit and improve the probability of a successful product introduction.

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