New Product Blueprinting – How to Avoid Commercial Risk in New Product Development

By Don Adams

Technologists in the coatings industry work hard to bring high-value innovation to their customers. Unfortunately, many of their technical suc­cesses fail for commercial reasons. In the future, this will change. If you make coatings for other companies-or ingredients for coatings producers-your business-to-business (B2B) cus­tomers can help you eliminate most commercial risk before you step into your lab. This article details how this can be achieved. Imagine you are in the lab working on your next coating­ or coating ingredient-and your only question is whether you will succeed technically. You have complete commercial con­fidence. If you can hit your tech­nical design targets, you know the market will eagerly buy your product and pay a premium.

And this will be true for your next project … and your next … Does this sound like an alter­nate reality, a parallel universe you have not visited? I believe this will be commonplace in the future, at least for B2B inno­vators. Future innovators will look back at today’s approach and chuckle. Or cringe. Today, many companies launch their products at customers, hoping they will like them. Can you imagine a less efficient way to understand market needs than going through the entire prod­uct development process first?