Idea Validation: How important is it?

An idea can change the rule of New Product Development. It comes to include your soon to –be developed product and how would it fill the gap in the market, when it comes to addressing a specific issue of customers. A little variation from this could possibly be the uniqueness of your product from those of the rest in the market.

Having stated these, validating the product idea holds the key to the development process. This could help your ideas reach the ground of reality rather than staying on a paper or a discussion board. Beta testing is one of the most efficient ways of validating your product ideas as it gives you the much needed feedbacks of your product from the customers.

Apart from it, the good things that can be done here are to have an eye on your competitors’ offerings, bring customers into the development process and have your experts’ team streamlined the process.

The bottom-line that is to be seen here is to be acceptable to any changes, provided it guarantees a facelift to your product.  All said and done, negative feedbacks also are to be expected from the customers, but it is always a wise decision to make them feel that they are at loss if they are not your customers yet. And a strong validation of your new idea is the success mantra here.

Product Concept Screening-A survival kit for small product companies

The major challenge of small product companies has been to increase the value of the products for their customers. It is probably known that there are as many ways to screen new product concepts as there are experts in the field. Quite a lot of them have been beneficial to these companies who cannot afford to incur a product development loss, unlike their bigger counterparts. These companies survive in the market on the basis of the reputation they have built with their few customers.

A sound screening of the product concepts is all that it takes to make that big difference. And it calls for a work around with their sales and marketing strategies and also with their key customers and buyers.

A concept screening against their marketing strategy will strengthen their focus and also will enable them to use their available resources for introducing new products. In fact a good marketing strategy should act as a good guideline. It should establish new product introduction standards and define the target buyers, translate the company mission into an achievable annual target and go on to achieve it in terms of key aspects such as product quality, brand positioning, market spending and pricing models. A new product concept must fit the company’s overall marketing strategy; else a serious thought must be given to either changing the marketing strategy or drop the idea of new product concept.

Screening new products against the company’s sales strategy also holds an equal significance. The new product must generate minimum sales and profitability goals for the company. When a small company is competing with larger companies, it can evolve a strategy vis-à-vis the new product minimums of the latter. Most small companies would be more than happy with dominating niche market segments that amount to $5 to $20 million in total competition sales per year.

Another important aspect that most of the large and small companies tend to overlook is roping the key customers and buyers in the loop, at an early stage, to obtain input and evaluation of new product ideas. This has to substitute the tendency of business owners and managers to get onto full development of a prototype without any external inputs.

A software product company that addresses these key aspects of product concept screening process will emerge as a clear winner in its chosen niche.