Posts by David Schatsky from November 11, 2008

David Schatsky | November 11, 2008, 10:48 AM
The Physics of Product Innovation

By all accounts, my colleague James McQuivey gave a blockbuster of a speech at the Forrester Consumer Forum two weeks ago. (Sadly, I was stuck in NYC.)

The title of his talk: "Satisfy Consumers For The Next Decade (And Beyond)." He described a framework to help consumer product strategists understand and meet consumers' needs and increase the likelihood of creating successful products. In a nutshell:

- measure your customer's need profile
- know your product or service's convenience quotient

James authored Forrester's first report measuring a Convenience Quotient in July — a ranking of over-the-top TV set-top boxes.

Future research will involve developing need profiles for a wide range of consumer product companies, and analyzing how need profiles vary, especially in an era of economic uncertainty. The framework James has developed will be a valuable tool for consumer product strategists, and I advise you to follow his work in the coming months.

As useful as the framework promises to be, I wouldn't expect it to make engineering the next hit product a slam dunk, though. Nailing the combination of features, functions, form, channel and price and the other factors that distinguishes breakaway hit products from the pack is as much about physics as it is about engineering.

Engineering is for mature, well understood domains, and is the realm of best practices and repeatable processes. Physics is about hypothesis, experimentation, and iteration.

Engineering will only get product strategists so far. To increase the probability of creating break-through products, they need to develop their physics chops: an ability to articulate hypotheses; a comfort with experimentation and iteration; and a culture that exhibits agility in the face of rapidly evolving markets.

By the way, I think Forrester can help with the physics part too.