Synopsis: Basic Chemical Manufacturer – New Product Brainstorming – New Product Commercialization
QDI has been an innovator in the use of “groupware” technology in the marketing field. Since 1990 QDI has incorporated the use of “GroupSystems” facilitation software into its Portable Strategy Center. The software, when loaded onto notebook computers and a local area network, enabled individuals to “electronically” brainstorm and build on the ideas of others in the group. QDI deployed the software on a network of 12 notebook PCs so that team members could simultaneously input ideas and comments. Each member of a team could be creating ideas and building on the ideas of others simultaneously. The net effect was much more rapid generation of ideas and a much more robust exploration of ideas, building and expanding on them as they we reviewed by different members of the team.
Using QDI’s Portable Strategy Center and a similar sized network our client owned, we facilitated cross-functional ideations sessions with R&D, prospective customers, industry experts, and sales and marketing personnel to brainstorm new product concepts. The session was made up of six teams of five people each. Each team would have at least one industry expert, in from the academic field or from a customer.
We spent one and one half days working with this group. The session started by having the groups talk about problem areas in their small teams. Then, we would take the problem areas from the small teams and allow all the teams to comment and ask questions electronically about the ideas. Each team would then review the input and reframe the idea so that it could be used in a follow-on voting step to identify the highest interest / potential problems. We used a voting tool that allowed all the participants to evaluate each idea on a handful of criteria that were used to score the attractiveness of an idea.
We then took the top 3 ideas and conducted a brainstorming step that searched for solutions. During this step we allowed people to build on each other’s solutions, looking for the best overall solution. The solutions were then scored by the teams to determine which ones the teams thought most closely met the need and were commercially viable.
After a day and a half of team collaboration we zeroed in on several promising product ideas that management agreed should be evaluated in the initial phase of their stage-gate process.