Open Innovation: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA

Part 2 OPEN INNOVATION IN THE DEVELOPMENT STAGE

At the end of the fuzzy front end of innovation, a product concept has been ideated or developed and all of the technical, market, and competitive unknowns have been sufficiently reduced or eliminated to move the project forward into the firm's formal development process. However, the innovation job is nowhere near complete at this point. The concept still must be converted into a physical prototype, specific features to include in the product must be selected, tradeoffs need to be made across different specifications, the resulting product possibilities need customer reactions, and manufacturing processes must be developed. Finally, the marketing and launch processes must be constructed. All of these tasks lead to significant opportunities to include potential customers, suppliers, and other experts in the firm's innovation processes to improve the commercialization outcome. Part 2 contains four chapters with Open Innovation methods that can be applied all along the development process.

In Chapter 3, Keeping Up with the Virtual Voice of the Customer—Social Media Applications in Product Innovation, Anna Dubiel, Tim Brexendorf, and Sebastian Glöckner reveal numerous ways in which firms can benefit from using inputs garnered through social media in their NPD processes. These range from very passive mechanisms that require little investment except time, to much more interactive and time-consuming techniques. The chapter provides ...