Product Innovation is the process of creating and introducing new and improved products to the market. While Product Development is the process of taking a product from idea to market. This article focuses on discussing the difference between Product Innovation and Product Development.
Table of Content
What is Product Innovation?
Product innovation is the process of creating a new product or improving the existing product to meet customer’s needs. It involves introducing new features, ideas, or designs that add value and differentiate the product in the market. Product innovation can result in delivering new products to the market.
- It helps companies to stay relevant in the market and continue improving over time.
- It involves introducing new features, novel ideas, or designs that add value to the customers and differentiate the product from the existing offerings in the market.
- Successful product invocation requires a combination of market research, customer insights, creativity, technological expertise, and effective product management.
- It aims to streamline operations, increase productivity, and enhance overall efficiency.
What is Product Development?
Product Development refers to all the stages involved in bringing a product from ideation through market release, including design, engineering, testing, and commercialization. It focuses on turning ideas into reality and bringing them to market, aiming to deliver valuable products to customers.
- It incorporates a product’s entire journey.
- It includes stages such as ideation, marketing strategy, and commercialization.
- These strategies are important to ensure value for our potential customers.
- It also helps to ensure that the product is of the highest possible quality before the product is released on the market.
Product Innovation vs Product Development
|
Factors |
Product Innovation |
Product Development |
|---|---|---|
|
Definition |
It involves creating a new product or a significant improvement to an existing product. |
It involves turning an idea into reality and bringing it to market. |
|
Objective |
The primary goal of product innovation is to introduce novel ideas and features to gain competitive advantages and address evolving customer needs. |
The primary goal of product development is to create new products or enhance existing ones by optimizing their features, performance, and quality while meeting market demands. |
|
Focus |
It is focused on the creation process and idea generation. |
It is focused on practical implementation and implementation of those ideas. |
|
Risk |
Higher risk is associated with product innovation due to the uncertainty of market acceptance. |
It involves lower risk as the product is built upon the existing knowledge and technology. |
|
Resource Requirement |
It requires significant resources for market research, development, and testing. |
It requires resources for designing, engineering, developing, and marketing. |
|
Uncertainty |
This involves a higher level of uncertainty as it involves exploring new paradigms. |
This involves less uncertainty as it involves building a product based on defined milestones, existing knowledge, and technology. |
Conclusion
Product innovation is not product development as it does not deliver new products to the market. It may help to provide a solution to meet the existing or new requirements of the customer. Innovation requires a cohesive strategy and goes beyond product development.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Product Innovation vs Product Development
1. What is the Product Invocation Charter (PIC)?
Product Innovation Charter (PIC) is a document developed by senior management to enlist the company’s new product strategy. It lists the resources required to start the project, project objectives, and guidelines.
2. What are the key performance indicators to measure product innovation?
Some of the key performance indicators are actionable ideas, costs, cultural impact, projected profitability, and actual profitability.
3. What is the main risk of product development?
The main risk of product development is that there is a high chance that the project starts with what the customer wants but ends up with what the developer wants.
4. Why is product innovation difficult?
Some of the reasons include lack of skill, cultural challenges, and lack of capability to innovate.
5. What is open innovation?
Open innovation means ideas and contributions come from customers, employees from all areas, and professional idea developers.