Standardizes, organizes, and controls operations.

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.