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Product Development
Introduction
Technology is a key resource of profound importance for corporate profitability and growth. It also has enormous significance for the well-being of national economies as well as international competitiveness. Effective management of technology links engineering, science, and management disciplines to address the issues involved in the planning, development, and implementation of technological capabilities to shape and accomplish the strategic and operational objectives of an organization.
The use of technology is an important factor in the process of a company's product development. Product development is the set of activities beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and ending in the production, sale and delivery of a product. It is often used in engineered, discrete, physical products such as television sets and automobiles. Product development is divided into four stages:
1. Initiation Stage
The goal of the initiation stage is to identify a new business opportunity. Projects go through two phases in this stage: knowledge prebuild, and concept development. At the knowledge prebuild phase, planning groups comprised of marketing and design representatives match market opportunities and available technology. The product manager and the product designer analyze the market potential of the concept and develop draft specifications and plans for project management and investment. Senior corporate and divisional management evaluate the new business opportunity as a cost effective and innovative technological solution that could be developed with sustainable margins on cost, revenues, and technology.
2. Definition Stage
Review of the product concept marks the end of the next major stage in the new product development cycle. During this stage, the product concept is defined, and marketing sets the context within which integration of design and manufacturing occurred. Commercial specification, outlining the functional and aesthetic features of the product, its price range, and its market launch program, including the required launch date are developed. These items act as commercial guideposts around which design and manufacturing engineering designed the product form, fit, and functions.
3. Development Stage
During this stage, the project team develops detailed specifications of what the product is and how it performs, what it looks like, how it is manufactured, and how it is used.
4. Verification Stage
The complete product is assembled by manufacturing, and tested under normal and worst-case conditions in typical customer application environments. The aim is to discover defects early and establish margins for failure modes, so that adjustments could be made as quickly as possible, before the sales and production ramp started. When the product meets the commercial, manufacturability, quality, and performance criteria of the project team, the review panel assesses the readiness to step-up production and ship to customers in volume.
The initiation phase of a project is not complete without a clearly defined goal and realistic, measurable objectives that describe the business benefits which are expected to be delivered upon completion of a project (Laureate Educatio...
Market Analysis Product Design Product Design Selection Detailed Product Design Build Prototypes Field Test Prototypes Finalized Product Design Final Manufacturing Process Order Production Equipment Install Production Equipment Celebrate
There are five categories of new products: new inventions, new category entries, additions to product lines, product improvements, and repositioning target products to new markets for new uses. The process is the same regardless of the category. It includes idea generation, idea screening, concept development and testing, analyzing the business, prototype development, test marketing, and commercialization.
The next step is the growth stage. In this stage product growth is monitored and big investments are made. Maturity stage the growth of the outputs is significant. For the company to ensure product survival in the market and gain a competitive advantage over competitors it has to incorporate product differentiation. The final stage involves product decline stage. In this juncture product sale goes down and the product identification
Focus shall be on utilizing pre-production tools while developing the prototypes. Actual material, wherever possible, shall be used in the development of prototypes rather than having substituted parts. Make the prototypes as closer as possible to actual outputs.
The Nimsoft project plan will be derived using discovery-driven planning and by discovering what has already been discovered. Discovery-driven planning offers firms an organized approach to planning for new ventures in emerging markets. Given the uncertainty of new disruptive technology markets, discovery-driven planning drives firms to make assumptions about the organization and the emerging markets, then revise these assumptions as the market develops. Unlike conventional approaches, which focus on projections and prematurely define specific targets, discovery-driven planning focuses on meeting assumptions at key milestones and continually planning and adapting while the emerging market evolves. Thus, firms are able incrementally invest in the project.
These procedures and practices are used both by GM and by their vendors. The policies vary from layered inspections, statistics, process failure modes, effects analysis and control plans (Drew, 2011). All quality measures produce a graded system of quality management utilizing quality tools. An example of quality control test is that of speedy response wherever dilemmas are resolved quickly and immediately throughout visual management. Individuals responsible for specific tasks are kept accountable for some corrective actions that may subsist. What General Motors did was ignore this quality measurement when it was dealing with the problems of the Chevrolet
However, this vision generates an overlapping problem between the marketing department and the product development department. The marketing department, among other duties, is responsible for the identification of new opportunities and also to assure the development of new products. Unless these activities are extremely well coordinated with the product development department, there will be misalignment in the strategy of the EPD. Ultimately, this misalignment will affect a third department, i.e. the manufacturing department, since it is directly involved in the product development process.
...f five people to generated new product ideas, among other tasks. One of their roles is to assist business units within 3M to generate new product ideas. They accomplish this by drawing up a plan to create ideas for products that will be marketable ten years in future. Once they have that plan in mind, they backtrack to the present year with new product ideas that are possible with today's technology. They then predict which additional products will be added year by year that will build upon each year's new technological advances to achieve their tenth year vision.
By following closely the six steps of the new-product development process, the company could expect such benefits as: improved teamwork, less re-working, earlier detection of likely failure, and higher success rates. (Rix, Peter, 2001, Marketing, A Practical Approach).
Samsung’s product development includes all three approaches. Samsung invested in a Customer-centered new-product development. The new-product development focuses on finding new ways to solve customer problems and create more customers satisfying experiences. The “new management” is a top to...
emerging or new market. It can originate from new technology or new market opportunities (Eliashberg, J., Lilien, G. L., & Rao, V. R. 1997). Literature defines product development as exploiting an untapped market opportunity and turning it into a value product for customer satisfaction. Development and introduction of a new product requires extensive research on understanding customer needs, market structure, emerging trends and analysing the internal & external competitive market environments. To evaluate customer satisfaction previous researches provide strong relationship between customer satisfaction and product quality, product features and value for money. ***
Setting goals for Process, Cooperation of the Process, Combination of the ideas, Evaluation, Testing ideas of Innovation Process, Execution of Implementing Innovation Process ,Estimation of lifecycle.
In the beginning lectures, I had no idea that brainstorming and conceptualizing an idea was part of an elaborate process to generate good product ideas. Great inspiration and a creative idea require deep thinking. I have learned that opportunity identification involves looking into the problems first rather than diving headfirst into the solution. Identifying and analyzing customer’s needs, market size, sustainability and scalability allows easy identification of low and high potential concepts. As stated in the article by Tim Brown (Brown, 2008), human-centric approach of innovation should be part of the design process as it gives insights into the life of an everyday person.
During the project initiation stage the business problem or opportunity is outlined whilst simultaneously various TM techniques and tools can be adopted to enhance productivity and overall project success. Value engineering is a technique which can be adopted to seize the opportunity to add value in the early stages of the project. The value of a system’s outputs is optimized by crafting a mix of performance (function) and costs. Allocating time for this technique is crucial during the initiation phase, as it deals with the value process solely during the inception and conception of a new product.