Developing New Products and Services: Learning, Differentiation and Innovation

The book is in press and will be available in e-book format and as a soft cover very shortly. It is being published by Busines Experts Press http://www.businessexpertpress.com/.

The focus of the book is on the upfront activities and ideas for new product and service development.  A central theme of this book is that there is, or should be a constant struggle going on in every organization, business, and system between delivering feature-rich versions of products and services using extravagant engineering and delivering low-cost versions of products and services using frugal engineering. Delivering innovative products is accomplished  by an endless cycle of business planning, creative and innovative insight, learning-about, and learning- by-doing activities.

A number of powerful concepts and tools are presented  in the book to facilitate new product development. For example, three templates are presented that facilitate new product and service development. The FAD (features, attributes, and design)  template is used to identify the features and attributes that can be used for product and service differentiation. The Ten–Ten planning process contains two templates: an Organizational and Industry Analysis template and the Business Plan Overview template. These two templates coupled with the FAD template can be used to develop a full-blown business plan. Entrepreneurship, technology and product life cycles, product and service versioning, product line optimization, creativity, lock-in real options, business valuation and project management topic are also covered.