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ABSTRACT --Most executives acknowledge innovation as a strategic element for growth, according to an Accenture survey conducted with Chief Executive magazine subscribers. Two-thirds of the respondents said innovation is one of the five most important factors required to succeed and sustain competitive advantage. Unfortunately the survey revealed that most companies commercialize less than one in five promising ideas and only one in eight of the respondents felt strongly that their companies excelled at transforming ideas into commercially successful products.

We asked several Product Development executives to share their insight and experience on ways to optimize the evaluation, selection and development of successful new products. Here's what they had to say.

Developing a consistent business story and doing your home work before you start a project are essential prerequisites for selecting the more promising product development initiatives and in return increasing your probability of success, states Frank Embs, market development and process manager for Wellman, a leading international manufacturer and marketer of high-quality polyester products. Embs believes a promising business concept needs to tell a consistent story by touching all crucial business aspects such as product performance, customer benefits, market attractiveness, technical feasibility, potential rewards, risks and probabilities and major challenges to be overcome. In Embs' experience, A business concept may sound great until you probe and verify the assumptions it is based on. Doing your homework by identifying and validating the assumptions which are paramount to success early on in the product development process will help you focus on winning product ideas and save you from allocating resources to the wrong projects.

For Dr. Kimberly Houchens, director of technology and new product development at OMNOVA Solutions, Inc., upfront effort is a requirement for having the right platform to stand on to generate, select, and develop profitable products. OMNOVA is a leading producer of decorative and functional surfaces and performance chemicals. An organization that knows its markets and sub segments of markets has a good chance of understanding what the customer really wants and needs. With that information, a value proposition can be written that acts as a road map for the product development team to invent within. Then new product ideas can be efficiently developed within the targeted areas, focusing the increasingly rarer efforts of the R&D team," Houchens says. Multiple product ideas will be developed and a new product development cross-functional team can work to evaluate these ideas for technical feasibility, potential profitability, and market appeal. According to Houchens, a Stage-Gate process can facilitate the review of the team's recommendations, balancing the entire product development portfolio to manage risk and rewards.

Mike Dolan, vice president of R&D for GOJO, Inc. offers this advice. First, establish the enterprise direction and strategy to guide new product creation. Clear business models, a burning platform or two, and a cohesive product strategy will catalyze better, not just more idea generation. GOJO, a leading supplier of hygiene and skin care products for healthcare, manufacturing, education, foodservice, automotive, and other markets, has found a simultaneous "loose/tight" ideation process and approach to be advantageous. "The very front end needs to stay somewhat loose to allow unfettered creativity, regardless of the ideation techniques and approaches used, Dolan says. Once ideas are formed to a certain extent (organization-specific), they need to enter a competitive evaluation process that sorts the better ones from the those with less commercial promise. We use a limited number of criteria, and those with strategic considerations carry the most weight.

Dolan believes if you don't provide focused resources for evaluation and establish a reasonably effective decision-making process, then you shouldnt waste your organization's time asking for growth ideas. They will get frustrated and the flow will dry up after the first round. You must be willing to kill an existing project to fund a better new one. Dolan advises, Recognize the difference between technology/product push ideas and market pull/needs driven ideas. New product ideas are more common but less likely to provide sustainable competitive advantage until they are mated to clear user needs. Finally, recognize that all organizations are inbred to some extent. Use what others have learned and developed to short cycle your own improvement and leverage best practices.

"First, use an agreed upon and standardized idea screening process to screen and categorize ideas," advises Norma Maraschin, manager of R&D planning and optimization at Equistar Chemical. Equistar is a chemical company and one of the largest producers of ethylene, propylene and polyethylene. A primary screening question should be around strategic fit with the company strategy, says Maraschin. Next, involve customers early to validate the concept and understand customer value. And finally, utilize Stage-Gate" and project management tools to facilitate the rapid development and delivery of the prioritized concept to the market.

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