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4.4 Product Discovery

97 When a company wants to develop a product without market demand, utiliz- ing a new technology, they are forced to commit capital investment and possibly years of scientific and engineering time. Even though the resulting ideas may be innovative and clever, they are useless unless they can be matched to a market need or a new market can be developed for them. Of course, devices such as sticky notes and many other products serve as examples of products that have been success- fully introduced without an obvious market need. While these types of products have high financial risk, they can reap a large profit because of their uniqueness. 4.4.1 Product Maturity Let’s explore the need for new products further by examining the technology ma- turity “S” curve shown in Fig. 4.13. This shows the stages a technology matures through as it goes from a new product to a mature product. Products are often in- troduced to the market while some of the technologies it uses are still in the “make it work properly” stage, some even sooner. Product changes and improvements occur as technologies mature over time. Think of each of these improvements as redesign projects—they are. By the time a technology begins to reach maturity, the market is saturated with competition and companies need to decide if they are going to continue to develop using the existing technologies or innovate, develop new technologies, and begin the “S” curve again, as shown in Fig. 4.14. If companies stay with the current technologies and further refine them, they probably have much competition and little room for improvement. If they inno- vate, they are taking a risk as the product matures. 4.4.2 Kano’s Model of Customer Satisfaction Another way to look at the need for product development is to examine Kano’s Model of Customer Satisfaction. The Kano model was developed by Dr. Noriaki Kano in the early 1980s to describe customer satisfaction. This model will help us understand how and why features mature. Kano’s model plots customer Mature product MINIMIZE COST MAXIMIZE RELIABILITY MAXIMIZE PERFORMANCE MAKE IT WORK PROPERLY MAKE IT WORK New product Time T echnology maturity MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY Figure 4.13 Product maturity “S” curve. 98 CHAPTER 4 The Design Process and Product Discovery Innovate Continue to mature Figure 4.14 A decision point on the “S” curve. Ex ci t e m en t B as i c Tim e Fully implemented Performance Delighted Absent Customer satisfaction Disgusted Product function Figure 4.15 The Kano diagram for customer satisfaction. satisfaction, from disgusted to delighted, versus product function, from absent to fully implemented, as shown in Fig. 4.15. This plot shows three lines repre- senting basic features, performance features, and excitement features. Basic features refer to customers’ requirements that are not verbalized as they specify assumed functions of the device. The only time a customer will mention them is if they are missing. If they are absent in the final product, the customer will be disgusted with it. If they are included, the customer will be neutral. An example is the requirement that a car should have brakes. If there are no brakes, then the customer is going to be disgusted with the product and may be injured also. Brakes are expected on cars and so, just being there is not a cause for delight, just a neutral reaction from the customer. However, how well the brakes perform is a concern.