Bridge Design

Yes.  But the real question is, what do you mean by “Brainstorm?”

Brainstorming has become the master brand for coming up with ideas.  However, not every kleenex is a Kleenex, and not every brainstorm is a Brainstorm.  Before we crucify or deify Brainstorming, let’s take a look at a few important aspects and some of the ways it can go wrong.

Brainstorming basics:
1. Brainstorming (with a capital ‘B’) is a formal and organized activity.  
2. There are rules (“guidelines”). 
3. It is a collaborative tool for coming up with a large quantity of ideas in the process of solving a challenging problem. (Note the word “ideas”, not “solutions.”)
4. It is a divergent part of the process, meaning that one of the goals is a large quantity of varied ideas.
5. It involves people.  People are a variable. 

The main issue I have with people poo-poo-ing brainstorming is that they are generally criticizing something I would not consider Brainstorming.  When you have a challenging problem to solve, doing a proper Brainstorm is an obvious and project-saving step.  However, it requires set up and proper execution.  While it is totally reasonable to say “let’s take 5 minutes and brainstorm a place to go to lunch,” it must be noted this is not Brainstorming (with a capital “B”).  And when said “brainstorm” fails to generate tons of awesome ideas and solve the problem, please don’t claim that the world of Brainstorming is ineffective.   

Device OEMs should strive to create company cultures that promote creative thinking. Doing so just might help foster innovation.

Innovation is important to companies' competitiveness and their ability to create medical products that will improve the lives of customers. In the last 15 years, medical manufacturers have seen many trends aiming to improve their products. But total quality or six-sigma environments sometimes feel more like regimes. Design has also been touted as a savior, and OEMs are often beseeched to listen to the voice of the customer. Such trends attempt to give companies tools, processes, and management structures to improve their ability to innovate.

These trends are exactly that trendy. Like any new method, they go out of fashion after a time. Sometimes it ’s for a good reason, but occasionally they are wrongfully discarded for the next new thing. Although many aspects of these trends have something to offer, the biggest improvement will come from taking a more-holistic view of innovation by focusing on three core areas of a business: culture, process, and resources. Try introducing six sigma into the wrong culture and it is bound to fail. Pour resources into a development program with a bad process and it is unlikely to create breakthrough products. This article provides insight into the aspects of company culture that make many successful innovations possible.

Culturing Innovation
Company culture is one of the main reasons well-meaning eff o rts to innovate have failed. In many ways, being innovative is a state of mind that must suffuse throughout an organization.  Obviously, leadership that allows this state of mind to thrive starts at the top.  Sometimes midlevel managers cannot affect the top as quickly as they might like—but they can nurt u re their development teams. The cultural factors within a company that are most likely to lead to innovation include many things that make most people uncomfortable: taking risk, the possibility of failure, bucking conventional wisdom, and the democracy of ideas. Innovation is an inherently risky process. To innovate, manufacturers need to explore ideas and potential solutions, and sometimes that exploration takes a direction that inevitably leads to failure .

But it does not matter that there are occasional failures; in fact, it is inherent in the creative process. What is important is that the members of the development teams are encouraged to put new and sometimes radical ideas out in front of the team.

The trick is to experience failures quickly. Test ideas in the first months of the development project, way before any serious engineering has been done.  Use every trick in the book to visualize the product and get it in front of customers.  Show sketches, prototypes, and simple foam models. Cheat prototypes into existence by cobbling together existing products or hijacking technology from other industries.  Show early ideas to potential customers.  Get ideas out in the open for people to criticize, but do it as soon as possible.

We have all met an R&D engineer who is a perfectionist, who labors for weeks to get an idea right before sharing it with other team members. Certainly great ideas can come from this approach. However, it is just as likely that valuable time and resources will be wasted pursuing a specific solution with an inappropriate amount of engineering sophistication. Regardless of how crude or polished a prototype is, it can easily be sunk by a faulty premise about what is right for the market.

Paradoxically, teams that learn to be good at failing quickly often learn to become better at succeeding quickly.  To encourage risk, and hence innovation, all team members must become comfortable with this paradox and adjust their expectations as a project moves from concept to refinement.  Taking risks early is inexpensive and potentially rewarding. Taking risks later in a project is much less desirable.  Then, the die has been cast, and linear, predictable behaviors are essential.  This takes almost superhuman management abilities, because unpredictable behaviors must be encouraged early on, but later, when the project progresses or employee reviews come along, the same manager must hold employees accountable to their management by objectives. Or the managers must account for the team’s progress to an upper management that is more skilled at counting beans than at growing them.

Who Is to Blame for That Great Idea?
Shifting a business from a blame culture to a healthy, risk-taking culture is difficult. Doing so is all about another important dimension of company culture: the people.

A project leader with great interpersonal skills as well as technical chops is key to a successful team. But people are not born this way—they are cultivated.  Along with the top leader, every significant project should have submanagers who are being mentored to take the leadership position on future programs.  Train for the soft people skills as well as the technical know how to cultivate a team.

Project leaders need to be supported by upper management with realistic budget and scheduling that has contingency built in. The entire team does not need to know exactly how much contingency there is; instead, the leader listens to each subteam’s needs and allots it some of the scarce resources.  Other team members must quickly learn the reasons for the allotment so that it is understood that there is sound logic behind it.

But even without a contingency, the schedule needs to be plausible. There is nothing less motivating to a team than shooting at a target that is hopelessly out of range. Obviously, there is never enough time to get every detail of a p roject perfect.

It is inevitable that a team leader will ask for a few miracles and, as the joke goes, these will take a little longer. But when the entire team understands the bigger project goals both technically and from a business perspective, and it is plausible that with a little extra effort these goals can be grasped, people rally to meet the objective.

One thing that helps a team’s motivation is to be in touch with customers.  This can be achieved by talking to them, watching them work, reading their journals, going to their trade shows, and hiring some of them.  The team then becomes aligned with the customers’ needs much more fluidly. Don’t restrict this contact to a select few; it should be spread around.  Also, it’s important to include the cost and time of customer contact travel into a project.

Get Critical of Criticism
At a more personal level, management and team leaders must eliminate the tendency to be critical of both themselves and other team members when ideas initially come up. This opportunity certainly arises in brainstorming sessions, where team members are exhorted to suspend criticism. In that context, discipline is easy to enforce.

But in subtle ways, such situations can come up all over an organization as a project unfolds. Sarcastic comments around the water cooler about nascent ideas or overheard phone conversations that poke fun at a part of a project that failed puts innovation in a straitjacket.

For example, imagine new, bright technical hires that join the project team and get exposed to such critical remarks. They quickly learn what it takes to fit in. They either conform and lose that desire to push for the new and risky, or eventually seek more fertile pastures elsewhere.  

Thinking of those bright new hires brings up the question of who will have the best ideas and how much weight should be given to each person’s opinions and ideas, considering factors such as experience, seniority, and education.  The best ideas can come from anyone, and in trying to break the mold, team leaders must beware the so-called wise expert.

Experience often gets in the way of new thinking, but it is an important partner in making things actually happen. Therefore, the entire team needs to encourage a democracy of ideas, especially in the early concept stage.

Do not dismiss ideas from team members who are either inexperienced or not technicians (such as marketing people). Instead, critical thoughts should be turned into insights about how to build on the seeds of the good ideas that often come from nontechnical people. It is really the whole team that creates the product.

Japanese industry from the 1970s onward showed the power of the democracy of ideas. Driven by its relentless pursuit of quality with methods taught by W. Edwards Deming, the country demonstrated that everyone who is involved in the creation of a p roduct has the power to influence it positively.  The quality circles made famous by the Japanese automotive industry allowed the traditionally unheard production workers a voice in product improvements that led to globally competitive and highly reliable automobiles. Even though one rarely sees these circles written about today, there is still much that the average product development team can learn from the core idea: those closest to the problem are often the best able to suggest solutions.

This article was originally published in MDDI on September 2004.

How can product development be conducted more effectively to achieve success in the marketplace? Studies suggest that the leading cause of superiority is product uniqueness, which is most effectively implemented through the use of a high-quality process that defines product value.

Product value is defined in the earliest stages of new product development. These early stages are also when strategies are created to ensure that such value drives the design process. Paradoxically, they are also the least-expensive stages of development.  To achieve maximum product value and marketplace success, developers need to spend more time determining what specifically should be developed, and not just how to develop it.  A modest amount of targeted prep work can dramatically affect concept development activites, laying a foundation for products that offer meaningful advantages.

Most people recognize brainstorming as a bread-and-butter tool for generating innovative ideas. However, brainstorming means different things to different  people. Some believe that brainstorming is a waste of time or that it is politically motivated. When managers do decide to organize a brainstorming session, they often find little more than personal experience to use as guidance. How then does one learn to manage such specific efforts and ensure that the process generates effective concepts that will lead to a competitive product?

This article addresses the first two stages of concept development management, taking into account that brainstorming is only one part of a larger product  development process.  A subsequent article will explain the process of turning all the up-front work into a productive idea-generating session and concept deployment process.

An effective concept development process combines innovative approaches with simple analytical and research tools. It is ideal for any medical product  developers needing to revitalize a team’s creative abilities. Taking a more strategic approach that focuses on customer value and technical solution space, managers can improve the efficacy of brainstorming sessions and increase potential product success.

Power through Knowledge
Three variables influence brainstorming success. Thesevariables are: the nature of the problem, a group’s potential for creativity (this includes the facilitator), and a group’s understanding of the problem. A problem’s fundamentals are a given and cannot be influenced. The potential of a group can be orchestrated somewhat by choosing a good combination of participants and by having a skilled facilitator who can lead them in a favorable environment. But the most significant factor that can be influenced is the team’s understanding of the problem.

A common myth is that to inspire breakthrough thinking, one needs to wipe the slate clean, withholding a project’s background information from a group. Some think that keeping a brainstorming group in the dark will increase the group’s likelihood of pursuing novel solutions. Although including group members from outside the company can often break organizational inertia, depriving a team of fundamental information can stonewall innovation. Studies performed in the 1960s determined that more than 90% of patents solved problems with existing solutions. Current research supports this finding. Therefore, accepting the mantra that “all design is redesign” is crucial to successful ideation.

An informal study comparing the creative performance of well-briefed groups and naive ones also gives credence to this assertion. The unbriefed groups launched into a creative outpouring on how to design an energyefficient light bulb. The other groups first spent two hours reviewing samples of 30 different bulbs and evaluating their design issues. Both groups reported a significant number of ideas, but the ideas presented by briefed groups were of higher quality and contributed more to the bulb’s final design.

Brainstorming, a topic covered in the upcoming installment of this series, is essentially about making connections between existing ideas. Participants should be inundated with information and allowed to filter and evaluate this information according to their interests.  This way, they are more likely to develop new insights or interpretations of the given problem. Concept development should be considered as much a learning process as one for generating ideas.

Forming a Team for Innovation

The composition of an early-stage concept development team greatly affects the ideas that are generated and pursued. A team should include 8–12 participants.  Team hierarchy should be flat—a single experienced facilitator should establish an environment in which all contributors’ ideas are valued equally. Diversityis critical in assembling a brainstorming team. Having representatives from different fields, different sexes, and different levels of experience is obvious,but diversity of personality type and background is often more important. It can be highly profitable to involve people with broad nonprofessional interests,or a personal connection to the medical use of the device being developed.

Encourage participants to step outside their roles as experts and to think outside their disciplines. Everyone can be a designer; many innovative suggestions come from participants who are not used to creating product ideas.  Humor also breaks a lot of ice, so bring in someone who can precipitate laughter.  Temper narrowly focused specialists with some generalists too.

Incorporating outsiders in brainstorming sessions can present some challenges. For example, in a recent session for a sutureless anastamosis implant tool, a company invited two surgeons to participate in a brainstorming session. These experts attracted much of the attention of the group, turning the session into an educational question-and-answer meeting, and few ideas were actually generated.  Therefore, carefully consider the role of outsiders: are they contributing ideas or educating the team? Use their expertise specifically for its intended function. In the above example, the surgeons’ expertise might have been more appropriate for use in briefing sessions than brainstorming. Including outsiders is valuable, but such outsiders must be selected carefully.

Product Definition

Participants should understand the specific approach to concept development they will be using. One major challenge in concept development is identifying and understanding the problem.  This challenge makes product definition a critical phase of concept development.  It is the phase in which designers conduct research and analysis to identify and understand the basic design parameters and develop a value model. In this phase, designers should also provide a strategic basis for ideation and product improvements. A thorough product definition can determine the success of brainstorming.  After all, it’s difficult to solve a problem without first understanding it.

Many companies already use some definition tools, but perhaps not as strategically as they could use them.  For example, some teams focus their efforts and resources on the most complex, but not necessarily the most important, aspects of a design. Other teams spread themselves too thin trying to cover every part of a design. The sidebar “Product Definition Activities” describes ways to address project-relevant objectives.

It is helpful to view product definition as a filtering process. A team starts with potential access to vast amounts of relevant information, including research studies, individuals’ experience, and consumer data. It must distill the information down to the most important points using objective analytical methods. This filtered list then forms the basis for an intelligent design strategy, and focuses a team on critical and specific topics for ideation.

One or two designers can conduct the following activities over a 2–4- week period. These activities lead up to a presentation to an entire development team of 8–12 participants. Those conducting the up-front research and analysis are responsible for organizing all activities in the concept development project. However, their voices are equal to those of the rest of the group in the generation and selection of concepts.

Planning. In concept development, planning is the most important step for getting a team onboard in terms of developing a set of common expectations and priorities. Is the goal to minimize time to market? To advance the technology to a certain level, regardless of time? A team should develop, document, and formalize its priorities and its strategy for addressing trade-offs.


At this stage, a helpful activity is to poll participants to determine each person’s most important objectives. It is common for a group’s objectives to differ at the start. Presenting these differences to the entire team and pursuing a consensus is an important first step.  


Learning. It is essential to conduct research and present background information about the product, the market, the use setting, the user, and the manufacturing and operations issues.  An emphasis on benchmarking and observation is often overlooked, but can provide information that reveals an opportunity for a competitive edge.

Benchmarking is a powerful twopart tool to help understand competitors and customers. First, it can be used to formally evaluate and quantify product differences, both in technical metrics and customer-satisfaction levels.  Second, it provides a method to look beyond similar products and serves as a brainstorming event of its own. It enables a team to investigate new and exotic materials, manufacturing processes, and products from completely different industries. Benchmarking also enables a team to crosspollinate ideas from these other technologies or processes.  

Some teams buy product samples that might lead to ideas or provide inspiration.  It is essential to have samples available to dissect, reverse engineer, experiment with, and play with during the brainstorming sessions. A minimal investment at this stage can produce important ideas. For example, while developing an intraocular lensfolding tool, one team came across some  Chinese finger cuffs. The toy led to the development of a set of solutions based on contracting a membrane by pulling on it.  

Observational research is increasingly becoming the secret weapon of successful product designers. Seeing products used in the field is an invaluable experience. This observation affords a team the opportunity to recognize subtle issues and challenges that others have overlooked. With this insight, a team can develop a more meaningful appreciation of what customers want. To gain the most from this task, group members may need to think like cultural anthropologists, industrial engineers, or behavioral psychologists.  Observational research complements broader quantitative market surveys.  Demographic metrics alone often miss the subtleties of the user environment.  A connection with the design challenge can motivate a team to create improvements upon existing products.

Analysis. To begin systematically focusing on the scope of the project, it may be helpful to use what might be termed an analysis lite approach. The idea is to use many relevant analytical tools to dissect the problem, but to get the most out of them in the least amount of time. For example, quality function deployment (QFD) is a method for processing product information and generating outputs that drive product development. However, QFD can be an enormously time-consuming process and, if done poorly, may be of little value. But if a team focuses on only directly relevant QFD processes, the resulting data can be very helpful. By using selected QFD processes to record information and to strategically generate discussion, a team can develop a basic output on which to focus.

In a recent two-day session for a well-understood product, the team completed only the planning and requirements part of the QFD method.  But on a more technically challenging project, it focused also on the tools for identifying design interactions and for structuring technical benchmarking.

At a minimum, the preparatoryanalysis phase should include the following tasks:
• Identify the customer. This may not be as straightforward as it seems. It requires a team to map out the entire supply and value chain, identify the key players and their stakes, and assess how money and information flow through this system.  For example, financial management makes decisions on some hospital products, whereas clinician preferences may be more important for others. The model can be simplified for other definition activities.

• Generate a list of about a dozen fundamental customer requirements.  (Put aside the 50-page design requirement documents. They are often overly constraining and lead people to think in terms of features and metrics rather than the customer’s voice.) A team should rank or weight these fundamental  requirements to focus on brain-storming topics and to use later for concept evaluation.  This ranking activity should involve input and discussion from all disciplines.

• Develop a similarly weighted list of business filters that defines the constraints and opportunities related to objectives within the organization.  These could include the bill of materials (BOM) costs, development risk, process development, reimbursement, inventory control, and intellectual property.

• Identify technical objectives. They can be general or specific. Examples include increasing quality, making the product a specific length, decreasing mass, reducing the BOM cost, eliminating failure modes, or reducing assembly time.  The team should then rank the importance of the objectives.

• Conduct analyses specific to the problem. For example, on a cost reduction redesign, a team might run a design for assembly analysis that evaluates assembly-time improvement.  For emphasis on reliability, it might conduct a failure mode and effects analysis on similar or earlier products.  These weighted lists and analyses form the basis of a value model that will help focus ideation activities.

Briefing. One of the final steps in theproduct definition process requires coordinators to brief the entire team.  Those charged with conducting definition activities can then create a two hour presentation that educates, answers questions, incorporates guest specialists, and shows samples. Two key points are important at this stage.  First, the presentation should clearly focus on the design problem, not just impart a large amount of information. Second, it should be interactive.

Team discussions may be the most valuable aspect of the briefing process.  Afterward, participants should be able to easily express the design’s most important requirements and objectives. To avoid overwhelming participants, the briefing should take place at least one day before the brainstorming session.

Participants should be encouraged to start thinking of ideas before attending the brainstorming sessions. Independent ideation can often be more effective than group brainstorming.

Conclusion
The concept development process is an effective approach to engaging multiple functional groups within your organization as a single team with a common goal.  The initial investigation and product definition activities are critical to defining a value model that will guide the design process. Furthermore, these activities will help to motivate the team for subsequent stages by unifying them around a clear mission.

 The second installment of this article will cover the subsequent stages in concept development, namely ideation, concept selection, and refinement. The success of these stages in generating and deploying concepts to a competitive product is ultimately based on the team’s ability to leverage the knowledge and understanding they have developed in the initial stages.

Developing successful products starts with understanding customers and translating their voice into appropriate product ideas and solutions.  Brainstorming is a common ideation technique used to rapidly generate potential solutions.  However, managers often find little more to go on than personal experience to streamline the process and vague admonitions to get a great facilitator and pack a room with creative talent.

The first installment of this article discussed critical processes such as forming a team and defining product value. This article illustrates how to use this team insight to continue the process. Doing so includes formulating targeted questions, generating a multitude of ideas in a series of team brainstorming sessions, and then systematically synthesizing the best ideas into a series of system-level concepts. These concepts can then be tested by potential customers and iteratively refined and improved. This process will help discipline the design process early on, saving valuable time and money and mitigating risk over the entire development cycle of a new product.

Constructing a comprehensive model of customer value and clearly defining the solution space is a first critical stage of product development. If product definition is successful, then brainstorming happens quite naturally. It is a far more controllable and predictably successful process than many believe.  In fact, when a team comes out of product definition feeling like they are prepared for the next step, they can often reliably predict the number of ideas that will be generated in brainstorming sessions.

Idea Generation
The goal of concept generation is to produce a vast quantity of ideas virtually without regard to quality as long as there is a focused attempt to address the problem. Some people are uncomfortable with this so-called quantity over quality approach, and some research challenges it. However, although both dimensions are important, it is difficult to assess the quality of ideas during brainstorming. In addition, there are no specific cognitively based means of  trying to deliver higher-quality ideas other than censuring some of them, which should never be done during brainstorming. Finally, quantity is more important in terms of team interaction and enabling team members to build upon other people’s ideas.

To generate the necessary quantity of ideas, a team must take on a high level of intensity and perhaps even competitiveness.  Factors that help teams attain such intensity include experience with the proper timing, skilled facilitators, process, and of course, copious amounts of caffeine.

However, real stimulation cannot be sustained for long. Therefore, sessions should be kept short; in fact, they should be far shorter than most people believe. A total of about six half-hour sessions, each on a different topic, is recommended. Teams should have a five-minute break between each session and should never attend more than four sessions in a single day. It is helpful to set a goal of how many ideas the group will try to generate in each session; 40 ideas per half-hour is fairly attainable.

While it may seem contrary to popular belief, the attitude toward concept generation should be to be focused rather than unconstrained. Good facilitators manage a group attitude without trampling on its collective creativity.  It is helpful to consider the optimal creative mindset to be one that is defocused with heightened sensitivity.  Team members should focus on the problem or topic, free their minds to whatever conceptual associations they may make, but have the sensitivity to recognize connections between ideas that may lead to solutions.

To support this goal, the organizers should carefully craft a set of questions for each topic session. Each question should specifically address one goal or requirement arising from product definition, but should avoid implying certain types of solutions. One method to develop a system of such questions is to conduct functional decomposition, a process of breaking the problem down into a series of simpler subproblems. The question creation task is far more challenging than it seems, and it requires practice, thought, and feedback from others.

Finally, sharing and documenting ideas is crucial to maintaining inertia and building upon those ideas. It also provides an efficient way to archive ideas sothey can be reviewed later in the process.

The documentation method suggested here is simple and can be more effective than using whiteboards or flip charts. This approach also remedies the so-called production-blocking effect in which idea generation is hindered as people must wait their turn to record or announce their idea.

A facilitator should bring a few hundred sheets of letter-size paper, preprinted with a generic format, as the medium to record note taking and sketching.  Team members should be encouraged to note their ideas and to draw large and colorful pictures, which facilitates moreeffective visual communication. Sketches should be briefly shown to the group to stimulate others to build on the ideas and posted on a wall in the work area.  At the end of the session, the sheets can be collected, scanned, and indexed in an HTML Idea Log, which creates a record for future investigations and IP protection purposes.

Concept Deployment
Once the stress of brainstorming sessions is over, the real work begins. The intense idea-generation process can be fun and invigorating. However, making sense of these ideas and refining them into realistic high-value solutions is a difficult task. Team members should break for a few days to distance themselves from the stress and any bias or ownership issues from the brainstorming sessions. The iterative selection and refinement process are the next steps.  

Screening.

Reviewing all of the ideas gives team facilitators a sense of what they have to work with. A short meeting (1–2 hours) works well to screen the ideas. This meeting should have no more than three participants. This step is a fast-paced, low-stress way to skim off the good, the bad, and the ugly. One screening method uses three bins labeled something like “Hot Idea,” “Maybe,” and “Back Burner.” Led by one person, the group can rapidly distribute the ideas into the bins. If an idea is obviously hot, give it the go; if it is irrelevant or impractical, trash it; and if there is disagreement or unclear potential,put it in the middle. This activity is not the time for a lengthy debate; everyone involved should recognize that.

Synthesis. Concept synthesis is perhaps the most challenging and crucial part of the entire concept development process. It is fundamentally a subjective and organic process that involves less-structured decision making. Two or three designers should start with the “Hot Idea” bin and work toward generating a set of integrated system-level concepts.  Single ideas are usually meaningless by themselves; they need to adhere logically to other ideas to form solutions that can be evaluated reasonably.

By developing a structural or functional breakdown of solutions, team members can select and combine ideas from each category. It may also be helpful to develop themes by envisioning system personalities and then combine ideas that work well with that specified set of characteristics. Often, such themes will be apparent.

With either method, it is important to group similar ideas and arrange them using a deliberate system. For example, one team held brainstorming sessions for a diabetes infusion set on various topics. Afterward, the team members pieced together ideas from those topics to form a set of six distinctly differentproduct systems. For example, one system embodied the notion of slimness, one was meant to appeal to children, one was based on modular components, and one facilitated the invention of a new insertion tool. 

It is important that all of the potential systems represent different concepts.  Some should be radical and some conservative; some simple and some complex. The ideas that are selected and combined should:

• Physically or functionally work well together.
• Balance each other’s weaknesses.
• Resolve design contradictions.
• Maximize product value as it was defined during product definition.
• Minimize complexity, cost, and risk.

This task fundamentally requires the ideas to be shuffled around. It’s helpful to find a big table or floor space, and start pushing paper. At this stage, it is also important to revisit the “Maybe” stack to see whether those ideas have since developed any potential.

Concept Evaluation and Selection. This is the time to get critical. The selection phase presents an ideal opportunity to reassemble the entire team for serious discussion.

A simple selection method, such as Pugh’s Method, can stimulate and organize discussion and debate. Pugh’s method is an iterative technique in which candidate concepts are compared with each other on a number of different dimensions.

The chosen selection method should leverage the customer requirements and business filters weightings that were developed during the product definition stage described in Part I of this article. Again, the discussion, rather than the numbers in the matrix, is most important. At this stage, emphasis should be placed more heavily on customer requirements than might realistically be the case. The team should not overly scrutinize each system to determine an exact numerical superiority between systems. Rather, the focus of this session should be to narrow the scope, either by eliminating ideas or combining and reconfiguring them.

Concept Refinement. Refinement and evaluation go hand-in-hand, and often these steps are iterated multiple times to move ideas closer to a more promising set of concepts. The goal is not to lay out or engineer the systems, but rather to develop a greater understanding of their nature, potential, and value.

Activities might include drawing detailed sketches (but no CAD yet), adding or removing features or functionality, researching patents, consulting with specialists, establishing significant economic data, and conducting focus groups. Very simple prototypes that demonstrate specific critical functions or evaluate product scale or ergonomics may be appropriate.

This refinement is an interdisciplinary step, so participation from marketing, manufacturing, operations, finance, and design is important during the process. Concept refinement also requires smaller working meetings with a greater focus on quality and specifics than the original large brainstorming sessions.

Concept Testing. Once the team has a limited group of refined system solutions, it’s time to return to where the entire concept development process starts: the customer. Testing marketplace acceptance of product concepts is vital to increasing the likelihood of success.  Such testing typically takes the form of consumer interviews or focus groups.

To make this effort successful, it is important to plan an easily repeatable test. It is also essential to engage an experienced and effective focus group facilitator and to work with diverse and representative subject groups.  Participants in development activities should not interact directly with interview subjects or focus groups.

Such investigations typically start with presenting study participants with concept-level sketches or storyboards for initial feedback on the ideas and not their physical embodiments. Only after this high-level evaluation takes place should a study participant see specific concept prototypes or renderings.

It is essential that controls be applied to the process. For example, all prototypes should reflect the same level of craft, and factors that are not being investigated (e.g., color, material, etc.) should be constant across concepts. This control reduces subjective bias variability.  Also, an experienced groupleader or interviewer should monitor discussion to ascertain valuable feedback and prevent runaway focus groups. The results of such studies can be used to select and further refine concepts.

Concept testing does not need to be an expensive, large-scale quantitative study. If the budget is tight, the marketing team could show the ideas to potential customers in a few diverse geographic regions.

Conclusion
The concept development process engages multiple functional groups within an organization as a single team with the common goal of exciting customers with new and valuable products.  This first phase of product development is crucial not only to increasing the likelihood of product success in the marketplace, but also to motivating the team for the subsequent phases, as this process ensures that ideas are ultimately envisioned by the team and not only individuals.

Using cutting-edge technology, engineering reliable products, designing influential advertising, and presenting trendy styling can all play a critical role in marketplace success. However, all too often product failure happens because excessive time and resources are spent on these activities while failing to commit sufficient effort to understanding core product value and determining how to deliver it. Following the process proposed in this article can help lead an organization to a more successful understanding of its own processes and products, and how it provides value to its customers.