Innovation, NPD and Commercialization

Expansion of Exploratory Analysis 

The most important issue for innovation is strategic market planning and analysis for existing industries and products and for the NPD process. This means analyzing demand constraints, internal capabilities, environmental and regulatory considerations, the political climate, trends, and other relevant factors.   Unless you understand the market, market demand, and trends therein, you cannot have a rudimentary understanding of the current offerings in your market based on history, nor can you make improvements to existing products, innovate for new products, or adequately segment, commercialize, or monetize them.  New scientific methods including, quantitative, and qualitative analysis, market tests, financial planning & analysis all aid in new product development.   

As can be shown from the history, new product development (NPD) has long been the hallmark of advancement in civilization and societies worldwide. Innovation continues being the driving force in continual product improvement and improvement in NPD processes, which includes improved agile methodologies for project management, marketing planning and analysis techniques. Some innovations are the responses to crisis situations like pandemics, military necessities, engineering for transportation, and a host of other examples, all of which are based on history.

Strategic market planning is imperative for determining whether to enter a market, expand the sale of existing products, or create a new product. Methods of strategic planning should be combined to provide an adequate overview including SWOT, Porters Five Forces, PEST analysis and others and are important methods for analyzing markets to determine whether to enter markets, expand sales in existing products, improve current products, or whether to engage in R&D initiatives for NPD.  An example of continually improving current products in planned obsolescence where the same product is updated every year like the iPhone, or automobile manufacturers update the same model every year. When there is no longer a demand for a certain product, it can be discontinued but a new model with the basic design of the discontinued model is used as the basis for a new model.