Contrary to what we are seeing in many companies, you can’t cut your way to growth. To build a long-term sustainable business you must innovate and develop new products. This requires a serious commitment from everyone in the organization. Product development is one of the few activities that virtually touches every function in a company. So what is required to get really good at product development?
In the next series of posts, we are going to outline 8 different ways to boost your new product development (NPD) effectiveness. In these posts the focus will be on the technical side, that is, some of the “nuts and bolts” of the research, development, and commercialization activities. Polymer companies need to have a systematic method to not only develop new products, but make sure they have a pipeline of new enabling technologies. Here are the 8 ways to boost polymer product development effectiveness:
- Implement an overall Technology Delivery System
- Focus on “loose” management in the technology development (research phase)
- Develop enabling Technology Platforms
- Add Open Innovation to accelerate Technology Platform development
- Use Product Architectures to build robust new products
- Integrate Technology Platforms into Product Architectures
- Use design tools to accelerate product development (debunking the myths of Design for Six Sigma)
- Leverage Product Architectures to rapidly complete product line extensions to stay ahead of your competition
Subsequent posts will go into more details for each of the 8 tactics. Previously we talked about how to maximize innovation profitability by:
- Having an organization designed for speed using multidisciplinary teams with dedicated resources
- Tightly integrating marketing/sales with the R&D team to drive technology development by market pull not “technology push.”
- Close customer relationships to enable product “beta” testing and rapid iterations
The next posts will focus on the details of the polymer technology and product development activities.
If you have a polymer product development challenge, visit the InnoCentrix website to download our free Advantage Series White Paper “The Five Keys to Profitable Innovation”.
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