You are the global marketing vice president at Dyson. You have been asked to attend a meeting with James Dyson, the company’s founder. Dyson’s CEO and the head of Dyson’s New Product Innovation department will also be in attendance.
“Thanks for meeting with me today,” James says. “Market intelligence has shown that our major competitors—Hoover, Shark, and Bissell—are all developing new cordless vacuum cleaners with a longer battery life than what’s currently available.”
James Dyson looks to you: “I need you to participate in a new cross-functional product development team that will research the feasibility of creating a cordless vacuum cleaner that works for one hour on a single charge. We also need to know if there’s even a market for this type of vacuum,” he says.
“We envision that this new vacuum will be used primarily in the home, but keep in mind, we want to be able to adapt it easily and cheaply for light commercial use. One way of doing this is by using swappable battery packs.”
Dyson’s new product innovation process involves both incremental and radical innovation. Radicalness is the combination of the degree of differentness and newness. This includes innovations that are new to the world, the industry, or to Dyson. Most radical innovations are new to the world (e.g., digital photography), and are very different from existing processes and products. On the other hand, incremental innovations lie at the other end of the spectrum; they are not exceptional or particularly new, they may currently exist in the industry, and may involve minor tweaks, adjustments, or changes from existing products. A radical innovation may become an incremental innovation over time as its underlying technology becomes more common (Schilling, 2013).
Once your idea is developed, write a value proposition for your new product.
Present the results of your activities in a two-page report identifying your new product idea, explaining the procedure you used to develop the process, and state your value proposition. Be sure to support your work with the required readings, scholarly sources, and reliable nonscholarly sources (such as Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, Money, Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review)
