Service offering
Breakthrough products
Creating a breakthrough product - one that genuinely alters the competitive landscape - is one of the most challenging objectives an organisation can set itself. If done successfully, it can create enormous value by transforming, or even creating markets.
Building a successful breakthrough product – one that truly alters the competitive landscape – can create enormous wealth. Why then are so few companies good at it and how can they get better?
In our experience, traditional product management and development processes often fail to deliver true breakthroughs. For mature products, which meet the basic user needs, competitive advantage is based on product differentiation and cost. This approach doesn’t encourage the risk taking that is necessary to create real breakthroughs – perhaps one of the reasons why many breakthroughs are created by entrepreneurial start ups.
Our involvement in this area has led us to conclude that:
- unstructured front-end innovation processes lead to variable levels of innovation ambition
- formal divisions of responsibilities between 'marketing' and 'development' lead to barriers in understanding whereby the innovators are insulated from market need
- these same barriers in understanding erode innovation ambition during the development process
The starting point for a breakthrough product is a real understanding of market needs and the opportunities arising from those needs. This understanding must become an integral part of the product development process. At Sagentia we have addressed this challenge by developing a three stage approach:
- we first set out to understand the commercial, business and technology opportunities that will enable the breakthrough
- we then employ creative processes that provide robust, structured innovation, giving confidence that the selected concept is the most appropriate
- finally we deliver the breakthrough product from requirement to manufacture via a structured product development process
This approach has been used by Sagentia time and again to develop unique, breakthrough products for our clients in segments ranging from office equipment, through medical devices to domestic appliances.