The Process of Identifying and Launching New Products & Companies

The process of launching  a new product or company  is a discipline that anyone can learn and through repetition excel at.  There is a method to the madness.  As entrepreneurs and business owners, developing a competency in the process is one of our primary job functions.   If we want our respective companies to grow and withstand the tests of time, we must systematically build this discipline into our organizations.

There are two approaches to launching new products and companies. The first approach identifies an idea, validates the idea through market research, and then creates a business plan to make the idea a reality.  The entire process is “idea centric.”  The second approach (the one smbZen favors), begins with self-awareness.  It asks: (a) what are our, or our company’s traits and abilities, (b) our combined expertise and training, (c) who do we collectively know, and (d)  as a consequence of these three questions, what can we do?  This approach is entirely “people-centric.”

The Bass Model & Forecasting Product Adoption (Part II)

This is a continuation of the previous post.

Estimating m, p, q
Accuracy of the Bass Model relies heavily upon the modeler’s estimation of m (the market size), p (the “coefficient of innovation” and q (the “coefficient of imitation”). Because determining these values is a rather arduous task, anyone constructing a Bass Model typically looks to analogous products. In the previous post we suggested that the iPod’s analogous products included portable radios, walkmans, and portable CD players. This is quite literally, prediction by analogy, and this is precisely why it fails for the truly novel. (personal note: for the hackers out there, this is a bit like proving a problem is NP-Complete by reducing it to another previously proven NP-Complete problem.)

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