Product Innovation Summit
{Design Strategy, Design Research, Service Design}
A company-wide, strategy summit designed to facilitate an annual meeting to pick a feasible amount of products to develop. With fewer products, our team could finish products faster instead of working on too many projects simultaneously. The day and a half meeting incorporated education from each department, a silent vote on our 50+ innovations and a secondary, structured discussion with exercises to eliminate further.
Summit Materials
Theme: Quality Over Quantity. Goal: Choose a feasible amount of products for our team to develop.
The materials facilitated a two stage elimination process to objectively choose the products that were FEASIBLE for Aeron to make, DESIREABLE to our customer base, and VIABLE for the longterm success of the product.
First Evaluation
The first evaluation included product ranking and popular vote (top 5). Reducing to top 15.
RANKING - Participants were asked to rank all products in a worksheet based on subjects pertaining to Viability, Feasibility and Desirability.
POPULAR VOTE - Next, each participant ranked their top 5 products using tabs marked 1-5. They placed their votes on the product prototype after touching and feeling it.
Second Evaluation
Pessimist vs. Optimist group exercise to understanding the importance of different qualities in products and learn what we value in our products
Further elimination on the top 18 projects from the first evaluation. A group conversation/ vote to complete 3 matrices with our top 6 product considerations.
Results & Statistics
A series of statistics were generated to illustrate the results of the summit and objectively show which products should continue development that year.
*Tallies are calculated from the total results from each participant’s silent ranking worksheet and top 5 popular vote
The top 6 were calculated based on the worksheet rank and the popular vote results. The company decided to consider products from the top 10 instead because they wanted to develop a variety of different products, with both passive and electronic scent diffusion methods.
*Green flags = Top 10
*Black flags = Eliminated based on low average score or in group based discussions about product feasibility
Graphing the Results
KEY
Graph view of the results, showing a visual pattern of top products rankings against all factors and summit exercises.
*KEY has a triangle containing the number the product was assigned in the silent ranking worksheet. The colors of the products stay consistent throughout statistics.
The lines show how the product did in the ranking. More decisions on whether to develop the product were easier to see this way. They also pointed out weakness that could be corrected in the feasibility and viability categories. I.E The Nebulizer development was chosen to continue because of the high level of DESIRABILITY, even though it scored lower across the board. The challenge was to make this product affordable to manufacture and sell.
WORKSHEET = Rank in worksheet vote
POPULAR = Rank in popular vote
DESIRABILITY = Potential appeal to our customers. Do they need it or want it?
FEASIBILITY = How much it may cost to develop and potential market success
VIABILITY = Will it work? Can we make it?
FREQUENCY = Frequency of overall positive ranking across all voting methods
The stacked graph view of results clearly shows Neatsy has the most consistent placement in the top 4 and was considered the winning product of the summit.
Analyzing The Winner
Results derived from second evaluation.
Winning Product Development
The Neatsy concept was the winner of the summit and continued development with top priority. The concept is a wax warmer cup made of a soft material so it is easier to clean and stays cool.
*I explored initial shape and form ideas with drawing cutouts that I could place in our wax warmer.
Continued Results
The Summit resulted in choosing the top products to start development on and the top products to finish development on. A series of meetings continued throughout the year to help choose upcoming products based on the results. We also examined products during development and eliminated them early if they were not feasible to make anymore. The overall summit convinced the Executive Committee to focus on more viable, desirable and feasible products, based on the size of our teams, the cost to develop and the demand/ competition in our target markets.