Strategic planning for New Products – Opportunity identification and selection

New Product Development:

Learning objectives:  Strategic planning for New Products – Opportunity identification and selection

Product Innovation Charter:   Strategy is the foundation for new products management and serves as a loose harness for the integration of all the people and resources used in generating new products.
What a team needs in its strategic statement and then at where its inputs originate – that is its corporate strategy in platform strategy, and in influences from many other sources
Why a strategic planning have:  A new product strategy does several things.  It charts the group’s direction, where it must go and where it must not go.  It also tells the group its goals and objectives and provides some rules of the road.  We first explore the inputs to this new product strategy which we prefer to call the Product Innovation Charter.
• New Product strategy inputs:
• Product Platform Planning:    In many industries, corporate strategy affects product platforms as well as individual product projects.  Product Platform strategy will affect all projects related to the common platform.  A new product team has some strategies from corporate, some from platforms and other parts of the firm, and some developed by the team itself.  In case a PIC will contain corporate mandates as well as product platform level mandates
• The term platform gained widespread usage shortly after Chrysler’s success with the LH car platform.  In the book selling industry a famous author’s name, displayed prominently on the cover can be thought of as a type of platform.
• Consider the following examples:
• From Toyota’s US Camry at least five different made in America cars were developed
Product platform are common in many industries.  One study reported finding them in the manufacture of aircraft, consumer electronics, and microprocessors.  Black and Decker redesigned its power tool groups into product families allowing for more sharing of components.

Platforms are possibility in service industries as well as for manufactured goods
Product platforms clearly is a difficult work.  Excellent cross functional communication, and serious top management involvement and support are needed to ensure everyone agrees on the platform’s architecture and how it is adopted to market segment needs.
It is also clear that firms can have very different philosophies on platform planning.
Brand platforms
Brand equity – value of an established brand is called brand equity
Category platform
A strategic business unit is also a platform e.g. the industrial diamonds division of General Electric.  So is trade channel grouping e.g. Kraft’s institutional food operation?  And then there is variation within almost every firm.  Marriott for example has among other things a very serious wide strategy of customer satisfaction, a platform strategy of value for its courtyard and a prestige platform for its giant new resorts.