ENGINEERING
Industrial Product Development
New product development provides an opportunity to change the competitive landscape. New products can help company gain new customers, retain existing customers and increase profitability. In short, new products are the only source of competitive advantage.
In today’s competitive world, companies do not compete on price or delivery alone. Introduction of new product or new product features has become main source of competitive advantage. In high tech world, companies can hop to survive only if they introduce new products. Old product s will rapidly become obsolete & new products become the only source of future revenue.
Advantages
- Best way to retain current market share is to attack your existing product with newer & improved products. The new products must be aimed at customers of existing product s and at similar products (from competitors). Cannibalizing existing products is a surest way to retain market share, remain fresh & current in the market place – and win some market share from competition.
- In most markets, everyone knows who the competition is – and they know its history, its behavior, its pricing and usage. Knowing the product so well will also reveal its venerability, thus allowing competition to introduce a better product. The same logic can be applied in the reverse. I.e. introduce a product that is way ahead of what the competition already has in the market. The new product should be so much advanced that it will take years for the competition to catch-up. In the mean time, the new product would have become the new market leader.
- Customer who use your current product will always have newer ne eds, and often wish that the current product could do more than what it does today. This is a latent demand for a newer product – which can be effectively be exploited by product improvements.
