What’s a business leader to do when faced with cash-strapped customers, consumer anxiety and Scrooge-like bankers? Two words: organic growth.
Dan Adams, author of New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth, argues the only way to win in tough times is through organic growth. “You have to grow from within,” he maintains. “That means becoming a well-oiled, finely-tuned new product machine.”
A company’s growth engine is its ability to deliver differentiated value to its customers through new products and services. “If you can’t develop new `stuff’ that customers want to buy—and keep doing it over and over---you won’t be in business for long,” Adams said. In the words of Peter Drucker, “The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs.”
In addition to recognizing the importance of organic growth, today’s business leaders also focus on performing at higher levels. Adams explains that adopting a blueprint process to new product development is critical for businesses. The blueprint process involves creating a mental picture of something that will excite customers and development the plan to answer two critical questions: “How will we make it?” and “How will we pay for it?”
“The next frontier is to dramatically improve the way we develop new products,” Adams said. “Future competitive advantage will come from what we design, not how faithfully or efficiently we reproduce it. Why be satisfied with great quality and productivity for making products customers yawn at…especially if competitors have the same quality and productivity.”
To implement a new product blueprinting process, Adams suggests B2B leaders follow these seven critical steps:
Step 1: Market Research
Beautiful product development in an ugly market segment makes no sense, so sift your potential opportunities early and cheaply. You do this with internet-based market research, combined with simple but effective screening tools.
Step 2: Discovery Interviews
Technical-commercial teams interview customers using qualitative techniques to uncover dozens of needs in depth. You enter the customers’ world to discover and understand what will excite them.
Step 3: Preference Interviews
In a second round of interviews, you quantitatively prioritize customer needs that are most important and least satisfied. You replace your internal bias with hard data...and kill your project if customers aren't eager for change.
Step 4: Side-by-Side Testing
You compare existing products you may have with your competitors' best. This baseline helps you attack their weak spots, avoid getting blind-sided, and optimize pricing...possible only when you understand all your customers' options.
Step 5: Product Objectives
You now have a wealth of outside-in customer and competitive data. Your project team uses this data to create a blockbuster product design in which specific customer needs are targeted and market reaction predicted.
Step 6: Technical Brainstorming
You've got the "what" (your product design), but must now consider the "how"...preliminary technical paths to pursue. This brainstorming includes technical solutions that come from outside as well as inside your company.
Step 7: Business Case
Would a venture capitalist fund your project? Twelve points must be addressed in every Blueprinting project. This drives out assumptions, bias, omission and wishful thinking before you begin heavy spending in the product development stage.