PDMA Blog

Product reviews (especially online) are increasingly important in helping customers make purchasing decisions.  A study by CompUSA and iPerections discovered 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.  According to a Forrester study, 71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content.

The beauty of the internet is that even small companies can integrate online reviews into their website.  Companies such as RatePoint (www.ratepoint.com) provided neutral, third party management of online   reviews.  They also provide tools (called Widgets) that simplify the integration of the collection and display of customer reviews into the seller’s website.  We use RatePoint as a way to give our clients an outlet to rate the services and products from Montie Design.

Customer reviews are a great way to encourage sales, especially of a new product.  However, you have to have sales to have customers who can write the reviews.  Strategic users are the early adopters (often cultivated by the product manufacturer) who test the product and write a review.  These reviews help drive customer sales and they also help encourage resellers and distributors to carry the product.

Strategic users can include writers and product evaluators for magazines and blogs.  Thought leaders in the industry are also candidates for strategic users.  Anyone who is in a position to influence the opinion of the marketspace is a possible strategic user.  Carefully selecting the strategic users and getting product in their hands is an effective to way to begin to shaping the opinion of the marketspace as early as possible.  The reviews generated by the strategic users should be a planned part of your public relations strategy.  Excerpts from the reviews can also be used in your advertising campaign.  The links from published reviews also help drive traffic to your website.  A potentially bigger benefit occurs as the links drive up the PageRank of your website and help potential customers find the product through search engine results.

Earlier this year we launched a product called the X-Rest.  Part of our launch strategy for the X-Rest shooting rest involved identifying strategic users to evaluate the product and help form a positive opinion of the X-Rest within the shooting community.Here are some rules for soliciting reviews from strategic users:

* don’t interfere with the review process, it has to be honest and genuine
* stay open to criticism, not all reviews are 100% positive, bad reviews can lead to great product improvements
* look for new ways that users interpret how they should use the product and find new markets
* have faith in your customers, they have a perspective that can help you create even better products

The following is an example of a review from one of our strategic users:

FIELD-TESTING THE X-REST
By: Peter J. Kolovos

INTRODUCTION & BACKGROUND:
Peter J. Kolovos, was a Deputy Sheriff with the Cook County Sheriff’s Department in Illinois, before retiring.  He has been involved in the shooting sports for well over 40 years.  He is currently the Secretary-Treasurer and Director of Training for the North Suburban Police Pistol League, Inc.  With over 200 members, the NSPPL, is probably one the largest police shooting clubs in the country.

His credentials are many but my most noteworthy are the following: Pete is a highly competitive rifle and pistol shooter.  He is Certified as a Rifle Coach (Level-2) and a Pistol Coach (Level-3) with the National Rifle Association.  He is a NRA Training Counselor and Certified Instructor in several shooting disciplines.  Pete has been certified as a Police Firearms & Sub-Machinegun Instructor with the State of Illinois.  He attended the FBI’s Sniper/Observer School in 1994, and shot a perfect score during the final qualification course.  He has hunted extensively in 15 states including Alaska, and has hunted in Canada.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:
The first thing I noticed when I received my sample of the X-Rest, was how compact and light weight the unit was.  Made of Aluminum, it came nicely tucked into a 14.5” x 4.5” digital Camo carrying bag with a draw string closure.  The disassembled unit was approximately one-inch thick.

Each of the unit’s three legs measured out at  9” x 1.5”.  The legs join together through a rectangular slot in two of the sections and are held in place by the third leg which has a half-round section with a hole in it, and a pin which is attached to the main section via a split ring affixed to a short length of plastic coated wire cable.  This system virtually guarantees that you’ll never lose the joining pin even in rough conditions.  I also liked the fact that it was made in the USA.

Once the three sections are assembled, the rest seemed extremely steady.  The cross sections, where you’d lay your rifle measured out at approximately six-inches high, making it best suited for either Bench or Prone work.  Both of the cross-sections that actually formed the cradle seemed to have an ample amount of a protective rubber coating applied them to keep the rifle steady and to aid in protecting the rifle stock from being damaged during recoil.

INITIAL RANGE SESSION:
On Sunday, May 31, 2009, I took the “X-Rest” to the Racine County Line Rifle Club which is located in Racine, Wisconsin.  My club was holding it’s monthly F-Class rifle match, so I would be able to better evaluate the rest at distance from the Prone position.  The weather was overcast as we had a lot of precipitation during the last week.  The ground was still somewhat soft from all the rain we had, so these conditions would prove interesting for the “X-Rest”.

RANGE SESSION EVALUATION:
Being that I would personally use a this rest for Predator hunting, I chose a Remington Model 700 Varmint, bolt-action rifle chambered in .223 Remington for the evaluation.  This particular rifle was equipped with a 6.5 x 20 power Leupold target scope.

I set up the “X-Rest” at the 300 yard line, placed a small sand bag near the toe of the stock, took careful aim and fired.  Since I wanted to be totally impartial from the get-go, I decided that if I muffed a particular shot I would not consider it as part of the evaluation.  I would only consider the shots that I felt I broke cleanly.

I fired twenty (20) rounds at this distance and put all of the called shots just under a minute of angle (three-inch group at 300 yards), which is exactly what I was hoping for.  I only muffed two of the rounds.  Several other members then gave the rest a try and we also quite impressed with it’s construction and how steady the rest was.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:
This neat little rest is simple, well made, and quite solid when assembled.  I feel it definitely has some law enforcement and military applications, as well as the civilian market.  This is a nice item for someone who’d like to have a portable rest available but not necessarily have a Bi-pod constantly attached to their rifles.  This would be a most excellent tool for a Rancher, or a Predator hunter.  It is also a very nice item for the casual shooter who’d like to have a solid rest to sight in their rifles but don’t necessarily want to pay several hundred dollars to do so.

If I were a school teacher I’d give the X-Rest a solid “B+” for it’s innovation, light weight, ease transport and of assembly.  My only recommendation would be to dip the lower part of the legs in some type of non-slip coating to resist scratching a vehicle’s paint-job if it were placed on top of the roof or hood.

Submitted by:
Peter J. Kolovos

——— End of Customer Review ———–

Reviewers can connect with potential customers in a very intimate way through an honest evaluation of the product.  Reviews build trust in your product.  Small flaws in grammar or composition in the review help convince that the reader that the review was not a corporate fabrication from a paid talking head, but rather an honest evaluation from someone they can trust.  Less than stellar reviews are often more believable that glowing reviews.  Customers understand that no product is perfect and can be suspicious when reviews are overly flattering.

Product reviews are part of the precious dialog between you and your customers.  Embracing user reviews can give you an advantage over your competition.  Finding strategic users is the first step in encouraging the creation of third party reviews.  The next step is to get your product in their hands for them to test and evaluate.  Trust them to take it from there, using their reviews they create as a part of your website, public relations and marketing campaigns.  After all,  you worked so hard to get that product out to the market, now is the time to let the strategic users tell potential customers what a great product you’ve created.

The author is Montie Roland.  He can be reached by email at montie@montie.com, online at www.montie.com or by phone at 800-722-7987. Montie Design is a collaborative product design and  development firm with core competencies in industrial design,  mechanical design and fuzzy front end services.

The New York Times article recaps what many have felt for sometime - namely, that the US is falling behind in Innovation.

PDMA is the only organization exclusively focused on Product Development and the mission statement includes focus on collaboration and new product development:

“Our mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management. This is accomplished by providing resources for professional development, information, collaboration and promotion of new product development and management.”

For those of us involved in Product Development the report is a clear call to action for everyone involved in the innovation process - we need to improve our capabilities and return to the top.

Read the article here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/technology/25innovate.html

If we dont act and act now it seems plausible that we’ll continue falling behind and potentially to the point of no return as the dominate country for innovation - what do you think, does there need to be a call to action?  What actions should Goverment take to incent innovation (if any), and if there are no changes where do you see the US in 10 years relative to other countries innovation capabilities?

Starting 2009 it seems fitting to focus on reinvention, with the power of new capabilities of “social networking” tools we are moving into the era I refer to as “Innovation 2.0”.

If you do a search for Innovation 2.0 you’ll find several references yet none currently focused the innovation aspect of product development.  The scope of innovation 2.0 and definition for my purposes is “The proactive engagement of customers using internet technologies to gain direct insight into their problems and identification of requirements that may provide solutions”. This is within the scope of Voice of the Customer, yet different in that web-based tools may be used to automate efforts to gain customer insight which can increase reach and scale.

This definition of Innovation 2.0 means a company engages with its customer-base to understand what improvements they may make to their current product lines, as well as understanding requirements for future product lines.  There isn’t anything revolutionary about the focusing on customers and their problems – what is new about Innovation 2.0 is the information technology tools used to gather information and the implications to business processes that result.

There is a general framework for Innovation 2.0 includes some or all of the following technical capabilities to engage customers and drive input:

• User-generated Idea tools - User generated input into problems,  features and requirements for new products (Spiot, Brightidea, Salesforce.com)
• Blogs – Communications between your company and your customer-base (WordPress, TypePad, etc)
• Wikipedia-like tools – Communications between customers within your customer base (PBWiki, MediaWiki, etc http://www.wikimatrix.org/)
• Ranking and Ratings/Product Feedback – Providing customers the capability to rate and rank your product after the sale as well as to how it fills their needs (BazarrVoice, LastPiece, etc.)

Before charging off with IT tool deployment I recommend spending 30 days to develop, review and validate your customer engagement strategy.  While time-consuming, the value of planning for change is invaluable to the overall effort.

To be effective a company needs to develop a strategy for web-based customer engagement.  Questions like:

• do we have staff with the appropriate skills and time to manage feedback from new tools,
• what changes to our business processes would be required and how long will it take to retrain staff on the new processes,
• what capabilities are competitors (as well as customers and suppliers) providing to the market
• how will we measure success (or lack of success) - what performance measures should be used

Let me hear from you, have you tried using web-tools for gathering Voice of the Customer input or are you evaluating deploying capabilities?

Rapid Prototyping 101 – Interview with Rob Connelly (check spelling) at Fineline Prototyping

Join us as we visit with Rob as he explains the basics of additive rapid prototyping. Engineers and industrial designers use various forms of rapid prototyping to create physical prototypes. Today’s rapid prototyping processes provide parts that can be quickly and inexpensively built, sometimes overnight. Other rapid prototyping processes create functional parts that simulate the actual physical properties, such as strength and stiffness, of the actual production parts.

Prototyping 101 - Fineline Prototyping from Montie Roland on Vimeo.

These videos are produced by the RTP Product Development Guild (www.rtpproductguild.com) and sponsored by Montie Design (www.montie.com). Both corporations are located in Morrisville, NC. Please don’t hesitate to direct any questions, or comments, to Montie Roland at montie@montie.com.

This past September, the folks at the RTP Product Development Guild hosted their annual Product Design Street Fair. It had the flavor of a trade show as it brought professionals together in an interactive environment, but by it’s design it was a little different. It offered the same unique advantage any typical street fair or block party would have, giving companies in the area an opportunity to interact on the local level. Newcomers got the chance to meet companies that were right down the street. The folks who returned from previous street fairs, found a chance to stay current with the local product development community and get acquainted with new contacts.

The intent of the street fair is to bring them together in an interactive environment (Download Event Guide / Program or Watch Video). This benefits the design and development community by strengthening communication in a fun and easily accessible way.

Bill Seil
Industrial Designer
info@seil.us

BarCampRDU 2008 was a lot of fun. According to the official website (http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampRDU):

A Bar Camp is an unconference where people interested in a wide range of technologies come together to teach and learn. Unfamiliar with the un-conference format? Here’s the idea in a nutshell. Rather than having scheduled speakers, everyone pitches sessions the morning of the BarCamp. Those sessions are put on a schedule, and lots of little groups form for intense group learning. Everyone is expected to teach, to talk, to participate. Yeah, its different from a regular conference - but it works!

The idea of an unconference came together when people realized the best times they were having at conferences were the times between sessions - where people with like interests could meet ad hoc. The goal of BarCamp is to facilitate this type of interaction for an entire day. We supply the food, the space, the wireless, the projectors - you show up to teach and learn.

Much of the discussion at the event involved startups and early-stage projects.

It is important to note that many (if not most) of the attendees at BarCamp are involved in the software, either online or shrink-wrapped. Our firm normally deals with physical projects that involve long lead times and very high prototyping costs. At BarCampRDU many of the projects, or concepts being discussed, revolved around software products that could be prototyped in a weekend. This is a stark contrast to the extremely high prototyping costs that we see associated with many mass-produced physical products.

There was definitely an excitement to the conference that showed through in the interactions between the attendees. This is the type of event that provides encouragement, advice and resources for budding entrepreneurs. It is my opinion that we need more of this type of event to help fuel imaginations and sheer force-of-will behind the next wave of product-driven companies.

Montie Roland is President Emeritus of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is also President of Montie Design, a product development and prototyping firm in Morrisville, NC and the RTP Product Development Guild. You can reach Montie by email at: montie@montie.com

We are working hard to make your PDMA membership more valuable.   We have purused more tangible benefits such as a free subscription to Fast Company, discounts on Business Week subscriptions and Hertz car rentals.  We are getting ready to launch a group health insurance plan which is a big deal.  And we’re not finished either.  We are assembling a task force to look at how to create even more membership value.

So the question to you is “will you be renewing next year?”.  If the answer is “No” then we would like to know why.  What were  you expecting from PDMA that we did not deliver?  Are you not growing in your knowledge anymore?  Are you transitioning into a new role?  Be brutally honest (hey, I used to work at Intel where its called ”constructive confrontation!).

If the answer is “Yes but…” then we also want to hear from you.  While we appreciate your loyalty we want to earn it.  I’m also guessing for some reason your not recommending PDMA to others who are considering membership.  What’s holding you back?

In the words of Frazier Crane “We still have a few minutes left, and all our lines are open”.  I hope to hear from you.

- Donovan

It’s great that the new Apple iPhone has 3G, GPS and a $199 price tag.  Yet to me that’s not nearly as interesting as what has changed with Apple’s business model.  It was less than a year ago when the iPhone was $599 and was being positioned by Apple as an exclusive, high-end smartphone.  Clearly, times have changed.

The smartphone market is a very different game than the personal computer industry where Apple has been able to control its own destiny through a vertically integrated business model.  It’s not so simple in the smartphone business.  Service providers are very competitive.  A myriad of different wireless standards across various spectrums and competitors like Nokia and Research in Motion that can crank out new designs so fast that it makes the PC industry seem glacial.

These realities have obviously affected how Apple is now approaching the launch of the new iPhone.  Technology is important and that’s why 3G now makes the iPhone competitive (2.8 times faster the original iPhone) with other smartphones.  But the business model is what’s really different.  Apple execs must have realized that size actually does matter, and in order to be successful the iPhone needs to be more than a high-end, iconic product.  Selling 10 million units will not cut it when Nokia can easily sell that many in a month.  To increase volume, Apple had to offer the iPhone at a lower price point. It also had to make the iPhone available to many other service providers.  Apple plans to make it available in 70 countries.  Lastly, Apple changed the deal with AT&T, which enjoyed a year of exclusivity on the iPhone.  AT&T will subsidize iPhones just like it does with all the other cell phones. 

So what are the implications from a product innovation standpoint?  Clearly the iPhone is now competitive technology-wise, but Apple may have to sacrifice its “iconic” image for sales volume.  It still maintains feature advantages because of its user-friendliness and integration with iTunes.  Yet product development just got a lot harder.  New suppliers, service providers, wireless technologies and markets will pose significant challenges for Apple.  The company has less control of the ecosystem than it has with Macs and iPods.

With all that said, I have to admire Apple’s gumption.  It is serious about winning and has adapted its products and business model to the market realities.  Many companies have chosen the easier path of ignoring market realities until it was too late.  Given their Midas touch in other industries I wouldn’t be betting against them.  “Think Different” has become Apple’s way of doing business, and they are getting better at it.

Agree or disagree?  What do you think Apple should be doing differently?

I remember a few years ago when Apple announced that they would transition from the IBM PowerPC to Intel Core 2 processors.  This was a major strategic shift for Apple and based on the quarterly earnings reports since the decision it has proven to be brilliant.   However, during  the same week that Apple announced great fiscal second quarter 2008 earnings (51% increase in Mac sales year to year in the last quarter)  they also announced that they were acquiring PA Semi.  PA Semi was founded by Dan Dobberpuhl, the lead designer of the DEC Alpha series of processors.  P.A. Semi is a privately held company that designs power-efficient processors.

I wonder what this $278 million investment means for Intel.  Was Intel caught off guard by Apple’s decision?   Does this threaten Intel’s chances to win an iPhone design with their new Centrino Atom processor?  Does this mean Apple is going to create it’s own microprocessors for Mac and iPhone?   

This Apple-Intel relationship makes them one of the the Silicon Valley’s oddest couple.  Intel, innovator of the x86 family of microprocessors, helped horizontalize the PC industry by embracing open architecture, open standards, and teamed up with Microsoft to create the 800 pound gorilla called Wintel.  Meanwhile Apple, creator of the Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone has always remained closed architecture, proprietary standards, and listened to the beat of a different drum.  But markets and business conditions have changed.  Both realized the need for each other.  Apple Macs were ingeniously designed but were performance challenged because of IBM’s lack of investment in the PowerPC.  IBM was in the midst of changing to a services business model.  Apple needed a supplier who had a compelling technology road map.    Intel needed Apple because they needed new growth outside of the Wintel box.  Apple gained a capable supplier and Intel was now associated with an iconic brand.  This relationship has been a win-win for both.  So why does Apple want to undermine this relationship?

I, like many others, can only guess why Apple bought PA Semi but I doubt it’s because they want to push Intel away.  PA Semi doesn’t currently make a competitive product to what Intel currently offers.  Apple needs Intel’s technology and manufacturing excellence if they want to produce leading edge products in high volume.  It would be very costly to design and develop their own proprietary chips and would move them away from their core competencies in product design and ease of use.  More importantly, it would alienate a great supplier relationship with Intel.  My guess is that PA Semi was acquired to create some unique intellectual property for Apple that can be used to differentiate their products, not replace existing supplier.  I might speculate further that the IP created by PA Semi will work with the new Intel Atom microprocessor in such a way that it will be very difficult for an Apple competitor to copycat.  Whatever the real strategic intent, Apple is thinking of something brilliant and the acquisition of PA Semi is only one of many tactical moves in a larger strategic plan.  I can hardly wait to see what unfolds.

Do you disagree with me?  Why do you think Apple bought PA Semi?  Do you think Intel has a shot at winning an iPhone design? 

Now that I’ve been studying user-centered innovation for some time, I began to wonder where the first insight into this phenomenon came from. So I did some research and found a very detailed interview with Eric von Hippel in which he describes the genesis of his Lead User theory. I’m copying and pasting the portion I found most relevant but the whole interview is probably just as insightful:

Well, when I first came to MIT, ideas about how new products and services should be developed were based upon a manufacturer-centered innovation model. This model, in essence, instructs manufacturers to “find a need and fill it.” The basic idea is that it is the manufacturer’s job to accurately understand your needs, and then make the perfect product for you. In fact, this is still the standard model of the innovation process taught in business schools today, which is one reason that understanding of user-centered innovation is still at such an early stage.

Before I went for my Ph.D., I was an inventor and participated in a startup - and tried to rely on the manufacturer-centered innovation model as I had been taught to do. Full of confidence, I went off to talk to suppliers saying, “Well, here’s a need I have for a new product you do not currently make.” The uniform supplier answer was, “No, you don’t. You need what we sell.” It was just so funny.

For example, once I needed a fan that was higher-performance and smaller than anything out there. And so, I asked this company to develop it and sell it to me. I said, “I need it.” And they said, “No, you want our standard one,” and I said, “No, I don’t.” And then they said, “Well, it is impossible to build what you want - it’s against the laws of nature - so you have to take what we have.” So, I went to Princeton with my problem and I got an aerodynamic specialist there to design me the fan. I then took it to the manufacturer who said, “Well okay, we’ll make it, but you have to buy the tooling. And you have to pay for them 10,000 at a time, and so on and so forth.” So, we did all that. The fan was wonderful; it did exactly what we needed in the fax machine we were designing. (The startup I worked for made fax machines.)

A few weeks later, the fan company reps called me up and said, “You know, it turns out a lot of other people want your fan too. Can we use your tooling to produce it for them?” I said, “Sure, talk to our manufacturing guy, and I am sure he will arrange something.” The arrangement was made, and shortly afterwards that company put out these ads saying, in essence, that “via our deep understanding of your needs, we knew you needed this new type of fan. And so, of course we developed it for you, our beloved customers.”

I found this so interesting. I thought to myself, clearly the manufacturer-centered innovation model did not work in this instance. But there is such a strong belief in that model that the fan supplier thinks it did.

Anyway, I brought that insight with me to MIT. I began my own research with the idea that, probably, it was really the users who were the innovators, and often not the manufacturers. That was way back in 1976, and things just built from there. I then realized that I had to join with other innovation researchers to build a big enough playground of data and concepts in the arena of user innovation to make it attractive for other people to be able to do their own work. That is, we had to generate enough findings related to user innovation, and create a robust outline of a theoretical framework, so that other people would be interested and would start to plug into it. All that took a long time, but eventually, we got here.

Starting about 2000, user innovation related to the Internet, blogs, and open-source software began to become very visible. As a result, many people began to think, “Oh gosh, maybe the manufacturer-centered innovation model isn’t the only way to go. Maybe innovation is really user-centered, and ‘user-developed content’ really does matter!”

At that point I and my academic colleagues were in a position to offer an academic framework to help people in their early efforts to make sense of a user-centered world. Anyway, that’s my view of how things have evolved. As my colleagues can also tell you, it has been a really long slog. Wonderful colleagues who have helped are many. Some who have been very important during the past several years are Professors Dietmar Harhoff, Nikolaus Franke, Joachim Henkel, Christian Luethje and Karim Lakhani. It’s much more fun to do this kind of early work with good friends. We can cheer each other up when our work gets dissed, as it regularly did in those days.

Thank you Tom Austin for doing this great biography. Here is a link to his complete article: http://www.gartner.com/research/fellows/asset_172822_1176.jsp