The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

Part III: GETTING STARTED

Know your enemy, know yourself, and your victory will not be threatened. Know the terrain, know the weather, and your victory will be complete.

—Sun Tzu, Chinese General, 510 BC

Understanding customers, markets, and their needs and requirements is a critical first step when developing a new product. Chapter 13 introduces qualitative and quantitative techniques for analyzing and segmenting relevant markets. High-performing firms use these tools to assure they target the most valuable opportunities for product development.

Firms that ignore customers, or only talk to them in general terms, risk wasting money and time. The risk lies in developing solutions to problems that do not exist, as far as desirable customers are concerned. Chapter 14 shows how to talk with prospective customers and elicit unique information from them to be used to distinguish your product from those of your competitors.

Contextual research is a new, but proven, way of creating information about what people actually do, instead of what they say they might do. The use of the contextual tools and techniques described in Chapter 15 results in development of innovative products that resonate with the needs of prospective customers.

Many practitioners herald customer interaction as essential for successful innovation. Others lambaste it as a useless exercise because information from customers is often unreliable, misleading, fuzzy, and imprecise. Chapter 16 outlines methods for helping ...