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    New Product Development

    Beyond the Eureka myth

    Innovating and commercializing original products is hard work. It requires a comprehensive, interdisciplinary development process. Each year thousands of new products hit the market. Many are launched with great excitement and fanfare…only to quietly disappear without ever showing a return on investment. While nothing can ensure new product success, the New Product Development course will show you several steps you can take to increase the probability: from clearer product strategies to strong business cases, from more cohesive team efforts to superior launch planning.

    This course will teach you how to:

    Improve both foundation and project-specific elements of product development

    Relevant structures, roles, incentives, and corporate climate—foundation elements—strengthen a firm’s ability to innovate consistently. Effective stage-gate processes and deliverables—project-specific elements—can help a specific new product effort go forward. Most companies can find ways to improve both.

    Generate and refine product concepts through market insight

    Lead user research, ethnography, open innovation, and a host of other techniques are explored as valuable methodological tools to add to your voice-of-the-customer (VOC) methods.  

    Construct and evaluate business cases

    It’s important to build a strong case for investing in your potential product. The business case is a skeleton plan that provides the financial, competitive, and market justification for the project, as well as market requirements for the product concept. We’ll guide you through the process of developing—and helping management evaluate—the business case.

    Manage the new product project team

    During the development process, the team will need to build the product, control scope creep, conduct beta tests, and maintain ongoing communication with management. Our experts will give you some tips for these efforts.

    Evaluate proposed launch initiatives

    The launch phase is where the “rubber meets the road.” Timing, communication strategy, branding, and a host of other variables will need to work in concert for even a good product to reach success. We’ll walk you through the most common areas of consideration.

    Who should attend?

    This class targets mid- to upper-level executives who are involved in developing and managing new products, including:

    • Directors of R&D or manufacturing interested in the "business side" of development
    • New-product managers
    • Product managers
    • Marketing vice presidents, directors, and managers
    • Research engineers/scientists/chemists
    • Project managers

    Day 1: Strategy, Structure, and Process

    Repeatable success doesn’t just “happen”—it requires you to create and use an effective framework. During our first day, you’ll learn fundamental structure and process elements and discover why a cross-disciplinary view is essential.

    Strategy and structure

    • Business planning, product strategy, and roadmapping
    • Clarifying the "fuzzy front end"
    • Assessing open innovation approaches
    • Structuring product families, platforms, and portfolios to reduce risk
    • Life-cycle charting and product-line pruning
    • Cultivating an innovation culture and facilitating collaboration

    Introduction to the new product development process

    • A standard framework: processes, techniques, and metrics
    • Aligning the framework to the needs of dissimilar product or company types
    • Considering different review metrics

    Day 2: Building a Business Case for Your Product

    Move from ideas to results with our detailed tools and reusable templates.

    Ideation and research

    • Expanding idea sources through novel ideation approaches
    • Identifying product and market opportunities and estimating sales
    • Competitive positioning and evaluation
    • Techniques for capturing the voice of the customer
    • Translating customer requirements into realistic specifications and a concrete product definition

    Building the business case

    • Defining the elements and role of a business case
    • Evaluating inherent trade-offs and conducting cost-benefit analyses
    • Financial valuation of the new product investment
    • Dealing with uncertainty
    • Preparing and presenting your business case

    Day 3: Development and Launch Activities

    These timely, proactive planning tips provide the tools you need to eliminate much of the stress traditionally associated with the launch process.

    The development project

    • Team decisions and processes
    • Managing gate meetings with senior management
    • Minimizing scope creep
    • Product testing considerations

    Implementing the launch and initiating post-launch efforts

    • Determining launch readiness
    • Timing, scope, communications, and training
    • Defining concrete "reasons to believe"
    • Post-launch monitoring, tracking, and control
    • Process review

    Dave Franchino

    Dave Franchino is the president of Design Concepts, an innovation firm providing product and service expertise spanning strategy, research, conceptualization, design, engineering, and prototyping. Dave has a passion for business innovation and tremendous insight into the strong link between design thinking and business strategy. He is a frequent lecturer on the topic of design innovation, and has spoken for Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Product Development and Management Association, American Marketing Association, and many others.

    Linda Gorchels

    As part of the Executive Education faculty for the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Linda Gorchels is responsible for the financial performance of and long-term strategy for the marketing program. She had previous strategy responsibility in the insurance, publishing, and robotics industries, and has provided strategy consulting or training to such organizations as Trane Commercial Systems, Kerry Group, University of Wisconsin-Extension and CUNA Service Group. Gorchels has been published in the Journal of International Marketing, the Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, the Journal of Contemporary Business Issues, and Industrial Marketing Management. She is co-author of The Manager’s Guide to Distribution Channels, and is author of The Product Manager’s Handbook and The Product Manager’s Field Guide.

    Brad Rogers

    Brad Rogers is the director of enterprise integration and process excellence for TIAA-CREF. He has prior innovation experience with Bank of America, GE Capital, and Arthur Anderson Business Consulting. While at Bank of America, Brad worked as the senior vice president of innovation and product excellence for global wealth and investment management. In that role, he led a team that studied innovative companies to determine what it takes to create a culture to grow organically. Based on the team’s work, the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) awarded the bank The Outstanding Corporate Innovator award, the first time a financial services company had received this honor.