I just wrote a new essay about product development. Maybe you want to check it out? For geeks like me, who stay up late reading about consumer evolution, this is fascinating stuff. If you’re a bit more casual about it, here are the highlights:
- The complexities of consumer choice make critical success factors for new products extremely difficult to predict.
- Nearly 98% of all patents fail to break even.
- It’s all about context. From a Product Manager’s point of view, isolating our choices to see whether we would prefer “A” or “B” is useless.
- Conjoint Analysis and Choice Models are progressing into advanced software based algorithms. (I explain what that means. Don’t worry, “I was told there’d be no math”).
- The web’s reach now enables manufacturers to test‘virtual’ prototypes instead of live models, resulting in a new magnitude of factors that can be considered and re-evaluated before going live.
I go on to discuss several different market research companies, their differing methods of prototype development and the impact on successful or unsuccessful product launches.
And I couldn’t help myself…the research led directly into a recent Microsoft acquisition so I set the stage to evaluate their approach.
What are you waiting for? Click here to learn more.
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