Customer driven innovation process

In order to drive improvements in the product development process and reduce time to market it is essential that the emerging technologies be sufficiently understood prior to product commitment. Today´s leaner technology development teams are challenged not only to predict which of the many potential ideas will create killer products, but also insure that they are ready for product introduction. Increasing global competition and the rapid availability of information has decreased the window to evaluate potential options and tradeoffs, select the best solution and then implement the solution that enables the company to take advantage of a market opportunity. Companies with structured processes that enable teams to identify and focus on customer-valued innovations and rapidly drive them to commercialization will emerge as the market leaders. Outcome-based market research techniques were used to identify the criteria that engineering and business teams use to judge the value of new technologies. From this research, a technology maturity process was developed and implemented that selects which emerging technologies would create customer value, identifies the potential tradeoffs against program constraints, and drives the development of these technologies to meet the product and supply chain requirements.