Vox Populi (Episode One)

A couple of weeks ago I created tags for the blog, just in case someone is more in the mood for reading about one of the topics than about the others. Once I divided the posts into the different categories, I discovered that Resources and Customer Revolution have been in the spot for quite a long while, so this new series is on Innovation. Let’s get to it, as usual, with a question: have you ever wondered what do companies go through before they launch a new product? I’m not only talking about manufacturing, I’m going even backwards, to the very beginning of the product’s life: its design.

The traditional way of designing a new product is basically composed by four stages. First, the concept of the product is developed: what it would be useful for, who would buy it, what its basic architecture would be like. Once the outcomes of these issues are approved, it's time for planning: a market has to be created, a small-scale test has to be conducted, and investing and financing plans have to be developed. The third phase corresponds to the detailed engineering of the product itself and of the technology that will be used; ultimately, after testing the prototypes, the product is launched and the production volume starts to grow so as to achieve the commercial goals.

This process proved to be highly inefficient in some cases: a lot of time is wasted because a failure in one of the latest stages means that all the tasks that have been already completed need to be redone. This is why some companies started to implement the concurrent engineering approach: instead of working in series, the teams involved in designing the different features of the product -target market, general and detailed design, manufacturing infrastructure- work simultaneously and share the results of their tasks in real time. This way, any possible problems appear in the earlier stages of the process and are easier (and cheaper) to solve.

Some companies are going one step further by creating networks with suppliers, independent specialists and even customers. Now, if outsourcing some of a company’s processes to a specialized third-party is already complicated, why would anyone involve people that are not necessarily experts? It’s pretty obvious for cases like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor or YouTube, where most of the content is created by outsiders. But for companies in other industries -fashion, transportation, IT solutions- there are also a number of reasons… I hope you read the next posts to find out about them!