Developing and Managing Offerings

Read this chapter. Pay attention to the section on managing new products and the product life cycle, and watch the videos.

Discussion Questions and Activities

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Who owns an idea? If a customer comes up with an innovation involving your product, and your company thinks that innovation can be commercialized, who owns the new product?
  2. Assume you come up with an idea for a new electronic product you think your fellow students would really like. How would you go through the product development process? How would you accomplish each step within that process?
  3. Select a product you are familiar with and explain the stages of the product's life cycle and different ways in which a company can extend its mature stage.
  4. Why, given the availability of good research practices, do so many new products fail?
  5. What has been Apple's pricing strategy throughout their products' life cycles? If you made iPhone copycat products, what would your price have to be in order to compete successfully?
  6. What are the risks associated with beta testing? What criteria would you use to select customers when needing a beta test?
  7. This textbook is an open-source text, meaning your professor can modify its contents. Further, multiple delivery mode (online, print black and white, print color) is a relatively new concept for textbooks. What type of screening process would you expect to have been used in developing the concept of open-source, multimode texts? How would that screening process differ from the screening process used to assess this specific book's potential? Describe what you think those two processes would look like. If you don't think the screening process would differ, why?
  8. You've got a really great idea for a new online business. But you need capital to get the business going and when you ask investors for money, they want to know if you've done a market test and what the results were. Why are they asking for market test results? What are the risks associated with a market test? Are there other ways you can answer their real concerns without doing a market test?
  9. What characteristics of a product would make it a good candidate for a phased launch? What would make the product a good candidate for a worldwide launch?
  10. The product life cycle, the BCG matrix, and the GE matrix have all been criticized for leading to early harvesting of older products and overinvesting in new products. Why did that happen when these tools were applied?