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Two fabulous speakers, David Minter and Michael Reid, shared their 25-year experience with us in a speaker series, talking about how to nurture new product ideas for Corporate America, which is from their book Lightning in a Bottle: The Proven System to Create New Ideas and Products That Work.

They started with pointing out pitfalls and common mistakes behind the fact that nine out of ten new products fail:

• Incoming: Ideas are coming from everywhere. Often, ideas from the top are implemented without proper evaluation.
• Brainstorming: The common approach is lots of people, no bad ideas, go for quantity over quality, etc., etc. It doesn’t work.
• Focus Groups: Consumers do not make buying decisions while discussing that decision with a room full of strangers.
• Gee Whiz! Too often, new products move from research labs to market without finding out if anyone wants to buy them.
• Rip-off: Rip-off means to be a copycat. It works well under certain situations. But companies whose new ideas strategy is built around theft end up a “me too,” not market leaders. When economy turns around, they could be easily wiped out.

They went ahead with ten reasons why ideas fail:

1. Trying to sell things people don’t want to buy
2. The ideas don’t make financial sense
3. Giving up too soon on good ideas
4. Pushing bad ideas too long
5. No separation of good ideas from bad
6. Thinking small
7. Delegating idea development to junior people
8. No specialized talent for developing ideas
9. No process, or a poor process to develop ideas
10. No real, important difference versus competition

Finally, they concluded the presentation with a solid process:

1. Learn
2. Develop Working Theories
3. Develop Ideas and Concepts from the Working Theories
4. Conduct Financial Due Diligence
5. Talk to Consumers: not in Groups, But One Person at a Time
6. Iterate the Concepts by Listening to Consumers
7. Take the Best Concepts Coming Out of the Interviews and “Monetize” Them