New Product Development

1. What characteristics describe innovative organizations? If you were attempting to transform an average organization into an innovative organization, what is the most significant obstacle you might encounter?

2. How is corporate venturing used as an aid to search for innovation opportunities? Explain the relationship of the organization's strategic plan and vision statement to the corporate venturing methodology.

3. Compare and contrast assembly customization with design customization. Why are efforts to maintain barriers to existing or new competitors using assembly customization of limited effectiveness?

4. What is product liability? How might it impact a firm?

5. When engaged in strategic management activities, a choice is often made between innovation leadership and innovation followership. Compare and contrast these two activities. When might management teams find an innovation leadership role a possible disadvantage? Describe at least two reasons for the possible disadvantage.

6. When developing products, what does the term relative advantage mean? Explain why management teams should be concerned about a new product's relative advantage.

7. When a product is launched, the strategic plan is generally focused on success. Not all product launches succeed, however, and failure is sometimes encountered. Should a strategic plan have a section devoted to terminating the launch if certain criteria are met, or should the plan contain provision for the launch to continue until the market determines success or failure? Defend your response.

8. When developing a marketing plan, we should consider market differentiation. What does market differentiation mean? Explain why relative quality in conjunction with market differentiation is important to our marketing effort.

9. Products fail for many reasons, and testing can identify possible failure points before launch. When preparing a budget for product testing, explain why or why not you would invest the time and money to identify delighters, those things that make customers happy even if customers do not explicitly demand these features. If you would, what technique would you use to identify delighters?