Micrex CEO’s Blog

Odds Of Success (Part 1)

/in /by

We were taught in business school that only 1 in 20 new products succeeded. There was not a lot of definition around “new” or “success”, but it was a daunting enough metric by itself.
Roulette Wheel
As an adult it seems more like 1 in 50. Of course, it depends on what is meant by success and failure and one’s industry, but it remains a daunting number. I understand that in pharmaceuticals the ratio is more like 1 – 10,000!

Understanding and managing these odds have interesting implications for product developers…

Methodology Gives Those With No Ideas Something to Do

/in /by

The title above was taken from Mason Cooley’s “City Aphorisms”. You have got to love it.

In brief – here is how large corporations approach product development. It begins with idea generation. This is the brain storming – the hard-to-define process aptly called “The Fuzzy Front End”. While there are scholarly works dedicated to just this portion of new product development, this is probably the least well-understood part of the process.

Ideas that successfully exit the “front end” will then go through a series of stage/gates before finally being commercialized as a new product. These stages are relatively easy to define and are usually well-understood by the host company.

As much has been written about The Fuzzy Front End as well as Stage/Gate, I recommend other sources for a more detailed explanation.

Despite the existence of this conceptual framework, companies have a very difficult time innovating successfully.

This blog will explore why this is and what can be done about it.