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COMMERCIALIZE A NEW IDEA

Often a firm with a new product wants to penetrate the biggest markets as fast as possible. It pours resources into developing marquee accounts, and adapts the product to meet the needs of these very demanding customers. It may even drop price to get the business, or acquire a channel partner in an effort to push the innovation into customers’ hands. The results: long sales cycles, escalating costs, persisting low prices, channel conflict, and huge distractions.

We find that a counter-intuitive route is much more successful. Firms need to get to market quickly, with companies that will tolerate a less-than-perfect solution, and then learn by doing. Real feedback from the marketplace is infinitely more instructive than countless hours at a whiteboard mapping the hypothetical solution.

Firms should also seek clients and market segments that hunger for new solutions, require short sales cycles, don’t see failure of the product as a major business risk, and can quickly prove the product’s value. Typically, these aren’t the biggest potential customers, and they may even be off the radar screen of most competitors in the industry. But they get points on the board, generate critical feedback, and serve as a “good enough” reference to other market niches that will welcome the new solution.

Specific ways in which we help our clients find such opportunities and drive growth include:

  • Evaluate Ideas Against Success Patterns – a consulting effort that enables efficient review of an idea’s true potential for disruption against the inherent assumptions and risk that must be tested and overcome.
  • Take Ideas to Market – a consulting effort that applies our “test and learn” approach to new product development to the practice of business model innovation essentially looking for low cost ways to evaluate the target customers’ acceptance of, and satisfaction with, the proposed model.
  • Innosight Labs – a low cost, offshore-based approach to rapid prototyping allows you to produce physical samples of ideas under consideration to enable more effective target customer evaluations yielding more constructive feedback.