Abstract
Innovating is crucial for a company in order to satisfy its customers' expectations and to cope with the competition in a market which is everyday more challenging than before. However, coping with the competition doesn't mean offering products which are somehow better or cheaper than the competition. Not at all. One must differentiate itself from the competition by offering innovative products, and the only way to be acknowledged as an innovative company is to stand one step further than the competition. Of course, it is easier to say than to implement.
Indeed, most of the companies try to innovate to rejuvenate their portfolio and to meet new trends. However, around 90% of the new mass consumer goods launched in Europe are failures compared to the 95% rate in the US. It is quite worrying and it is not only a reality in the mass consumer goods market but also in all the rapidly evolving markets. These rates also stress on the importance of new product development processes which can be used as a major tool to decrease these risks of failures.
Most companies implement the traditional marketing research methods to generate new ideas, to develop and assess the potential of new concepts. These methods often try to discover new customer needs by analyzing customer complaints, buying patterns, preferences and enable to test the rate of customer acceptance once a prototype has been created through customer testing, pre-testing before marketing etc. However, these methods rarely offer insights to identify innovations that could have already been developed by users.
A professor of the MIT Sloan School of Management focused his studies on this poorly-known side of the new product development process. Professor Eric von Hippel then defined the Lead User Method, a method designed to deepen our understanding of the innovation process and to improve the success of new product development by identifying who he calls ?Lead users'.
Thus, a company undertaking a new product development process will experience a lot of pressure due to the high rates of new product failures.
How can we decrease the risks of failures and thus improve the chances of success of new products? Would the Lead user method provide a solution? Would it help better assess the needs and trends of the market and design a product that will fit these needs and trends?
This thesis will be aimed at understanding the reasons linked to new product failures and at assessing the conventional new product development methods and the Lead user method in order to provide a hypothesis that will improve the chances of success of new products.
