New product development in SMEs
New ideas can be the easiest part of product development and innovation within a business. New product development implies either a completely new product or the renewal of an older product aiming at a better market fit. All you need is a creative team and a few good brainstorming sessions where everyone can be inspired by one another. Then you’ll have the eureka moment – which, by the way, is one of the biggest myths about innovation – and there you are with a new, great product ready to elevate your business. But is this all you need?
You know the answer already! You have the idea of the product but not the actual product. And you might now wonder, is there any way to optimise the new product development process towards a successful launch? Every business has different needs, and no team is the same. However, a few tips can help teams perform in the best possible way when working on new product development.
1. The Great Idea
Host a brainstorming session and use the SCAMPER model to challenge your team’s creativity, activate their design thinking and innovative behaviour. SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse/Rearrange.
Substitute means that you can replace any part of your product with something else and come up with an invention. Some ideas might not be a perfect product-market fit, but you can combine different solutions and develop a radical innovation. Adapting to the market demand will help you scale up your business. Modification is proven to clarify how a product or a service could be a real solution to a problem. Put to another use implies product fit to a different issue. Eliminate, in essence, refers to streamlining any unnecessary processes and finally, the Reverse is about changing the direction or the use of a product.
2. Set product specifications
When launching a new product or service, you need to set specific and measurable goals to manage the processes and progress. Product specification will help you and your team optimise the overall performance, and at the same time, it will make the distribution of tasks more manageable. For instance, agreeing on design information from the beginning can make the design team operate quicker and more efficiently.
Product specifications can occur at any time and at any phase of the product development. However, every specification needs to be specific, measurable, testable or verifiable at an early stage and not just at the end. This will save you uptime and cost as well as allow you to fix any possible flaws.
3. Consumer matrix
There are numerous reasons why your product development should be customer-centric. Imagine the processes of your product development as a matrix. Every aspect of it should fulfil a consumer’s need. As a first step, you should take some time to identify your potential customers and partners. Then you need to understand in depth what they need and how you can offer it to them as part of your product development.
At this stage, it is very important to set priorities. Then, as the project manager, you should relate them to how important and relevant they might be to your consumer needs. Even though engineering and infrastructure are at the core of product development, it is essential to translate these processes into market demand. You can use a scale from 1-5 or 1-10 to correlate the consumer needs with your operations.
4. Product development in SMEs
The complexity of a project differs depending on the scale of a business. A company that employs 100 people does not have the same structural and organisational processes as ten employees. Product development in small or medium enterprises could become a hurdle bearing in mind that the time and the cost distribution based on tasks could negatively affect the business. There are two things you could do as an owner of a small enterprise.
You could choose to near-source or outsource your internal R&D or rearrange the team according to your employees’ bandwidth. Divide your team into two groups. The first one would ensure that the product development process is divided into smaller tasks and that every process occurring is defined. The second group is responsible for generating the strategy and the concept. That way, everyone within your workgroup knows their tasks, and therefore you can spend time managing the overall project’s progress instead of micromanaging your employees. If you are looking to near-source or outsource your product or software development, we can connect you with an industry-leading service provider who can assist you.
5. The importance of an MVP
Before developing the entire product, you might want to have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test different functions, the market fit, and your invention’s impact on your customers. Your MVP will be used by the early adopters of your product, who then can give you feedback and help you with future developments.
An MVP is also essential for your team since it can reduce unnecessary and lengthy work that will cost your business money and time. An MVP looks different for every project. If you develop a software-based product, you will build the prototype and the wireframes as your MVP. You might want to test your product design if you are creating an app. It could be as simple as a sketch.
6. Costing and commercialisation
Clearly, pricing a product and positioning it within the market is as important as developing it. Without a strategy in place, your product might not be able to compete in the market. The world is full of innovative ideas that better our wellbeing and solve problems both complex and straightforward. Your price should be attractive to the consumer and not far apart from your competitor’s pricing. It should resonate with the services you offer and match your customers’ needs, motives and goals. Don’t wait until the last minute to launch your product.
You can always use organic growth strategies to raise awareness and emotionally prepare your audience for what is coming. You can use landing pages where your prospects can subscribe, send product launching emails to your mailing lists, work with influencers from your industry to promote your product. Plan and execute social media campaigns and finally make your employees the most prominent advocates of your brand: ask them to support the effort that you as a team make.
