Selling Blue Elephants: How To Make Great Products That People Want Before They Even Know They Want Them by PH.D. Howard R. Moskowitz -

Author:PH.D., Howard R. Moskowitz -...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-22T17:56:09.226000+00:00

RDE at the Heart of a Streamlined, Combinatorial Approach to R&D

An easy way to understand streamlined development is to imagine a scenario and then work back to what is needed for that scenario to happen. Our scenario focuses on a new start-up company in Asia. The company, Abacus (real name as well as the product name, Gamester, are disguised), is in the business of creating, commercializing, and selling off new consumer electronics products. Abacus’s management, all under 30 years old, each one filled with the enthusiasm of visionary youthfulness, has very little money—indeed, almost none. However, all four Abacus professionals are so-called Internet geeks, people who have grown up with computers and who find the Internet more a way of life than a technology. Before coming together to form Abacus, the management group had worked in different companies, programming, creating Web sites, selling computer software, and playing an almost uncountable number of computer games.

To understand what to create, it was important for Abacus to measure how consumers would respond to new ideas about consumer electronics. After some initial market research into their own business world, these young entrepreneurs soon discovered that the majority of inventive efforts they discovered followed a more or less consistent pattern: scan the environment for ideas, bring new ideas to consumers in focus groups around the world, and then create prototypes. Engineers were in charge here, so the approach was develop, measure, launch.

Perhaps there was a better way. The ingoing vision was that perhaps through the Internet and through a technique such as RDE, they could synthesize new ideas for consumer electronics. But how? What was the secret?

It first became clear that the conventional ways to create ideas were too slow. Tracking competition worked, and the market research professionals around the world certainly provided large reports that detailed what people were doing. There were rooms filled with reports in company after company—or at least cabinets, for companies that were less retentive. Focus groups could be easily arranged for a new product idea, but it was very expensive to run them, and, quite often, the groups did not lead to much more than confirmation of known ideas.7

Yet scanning the Internet revealed repeatedly that people were indeed inventing new products and services for consumer electronics at an alarming pace. It was clear from browsing sites such as CNET that the pace was accelerating, that one new product might appear and, just when that product was accepted, a host of competitor products then appeared, proclaiming one improvement after another. Figure 6.1, for example, shows just one of several e-mail letters sent out weekly by CNET. Multiply this by 10 or 20, and you get a sense of the intense, almost Darwinian struggle for survival in consumer electronics. Virtually all the hit products on the list are multifunctional. Just a few years (or maybe even months) ago this type of combination would belong to a science fiction world or be downright unimaginable.

Figure 6.1. Example of an Internet e-mail from CNET

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