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For consumer oriented new product development / Innovation (still the main route to market is B2B), the
diagram describes the effect of customer involvement at different stages of NPD / innovation process.
As illustrated in the diagram above, the customer;
•
Will validate the idea
•
Provide product’s relevance to the user. This reduces
o
Development cost
o
Development time
•
Will adopt the technology / product for their road map
These customer involvements will add better value for NPD / Innovation process. To accelerate NPD / Innovation process, managing customer portfolios is imperative for a company dealing with a multitude of customers.
To effectively manage the customer portfolios of a firm the following factors have being considered to develop
relevant hypothesis
•
Size of the customer portfolio
•
Revenue concentration with in the portfolio
•
Relational embeddedness of customer relationship.
For new tech firms, commercialization (B2B) of a
product typically involves,
Long sales and implementation cycles
Heavy reliance on commercial partners
Uncertainty due to rapidly changing
competitive technologies
If these are not clearly defined,
customers would hesitate to make
a decision on buying new products