Three groundbreaking insights for New Business Managers to shorten the Time to Profit… Today, as we all know, products need to be on the market faster and customers demand a higher product quality; two factors that seem to contradict each other. Researchers denoted these changes are the major trend for New Product Development, so understanding these developments is essential for companies in order to survive. Recently, researchers(1) found that the impact of speed on profitability is becoming larger than of product quality. In other words, an organization should not only strive towards making the ‘golden’ new product but should also be aware of the benefits of a fast product introduction. Nevertheless, We believe quality and time are not mutual exclusive but should always be taken in account together. From this perspective a research was organized with the following main research question: How can companies achieve a faster product launch in such a way that the time to profit is as short as possible and product quality acceptable? We interviewed ten managers of large industry and service companies. The result being three major insights which are of importance to realize time to profit whereby the product quality is kept in mind. The main insights are: 1. Focus on the Deliver phase of the New Product Development process to realize acceleration 2. The moderators Product newness, Market competition and Team autonomy influences the power of acceleration. More acceleration power can be realized with an autonomous team working on a radical idea which will be placed in a highly competitive environment 3. Use Organizational support, Organizational integration and Marketing proficiency for realizing acceleration 1. Focus on the Deliver phase of the New Product Development process to realize acceleration The Discover phase of the New Product Development process is mostly unstructured. Space for creativity and time is needed to come up with proper ideas which have a certain potential to become successful. One of the respondents said: “Do not accelerate at the beginning of the process, because than you will l end up with wrong ideas.” In other words, it will damage the quality. Within the commercialization, the Deliver phase of the New Product Development process, high costs are involved and sales needs to be realized. This phase is seen by the respondents as the critical phase where success of a product depends on. Companies struggle the most with properly executing this part of the New Product Development process. “We often have a lot of ideas, and know how to develop the ideas in proper products, but when commercializing the product it often goes wrong.” Consequently, speeding up this phase reduces costs, has little effect on quality, and leads to a shorter time to profit. But what about the context of the innovation project?
2. The moderators Product newness, Market competition and Team autonomy influences the power of acceleration The power of acceleration is also moderated by its situation. The moderators product newness, market competition and team autonomy were included in this research. 
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Product newness; the matter of how much of the product must be (re)designed, independent of the complexity or technical difficulty of making that change.(5) The results show that radical ideas could relatively be more accelerated than incremental ideas since radical ideas are in general less structured and are estimated to have a longer realization time. Market competition; the rivalry between companies selling similar products and services with the goal of achieving revenue, profit, and market-share growth(6) A higher market competition is suggested to lead to more acceleration power since people are better aware of the need to accelerate. Team autonomy, the degree to which a job provides an employee with the discretion and independence to schedule their work and determine how it is to be done.(7) Results suggest that autonomous teams seem to have more acceleration power.
In conclusion, to realize the most acceleration within the organization, start focusing with an autonomous team on one of the radical ideas which is expected to be quickly operational in a competitive market, because than the total acceleration power is the highest (see figure above). Knowing the findings above there is in fact only one question left. What kind of accelerators (X,Y & Z) are we talking about and how can they be stimulated?
Deliver/Commercialization
3. Use Organizational support, Organizational integration and Marketing proficiency for realizing acceleration The Bridge concluded there are three main accelerators to address for speeding up the commercialization phase. These essential accelerators are: Organizational support: the degree of internal support which is mainly dependent on the acceptance by the top management. The top management is, in general, able to remove or create barriers regarding a certain New Product Development(2). Organizational support creates internal possibilities to accelerate the process and therefore results in less resistance.
Organizational support: Show success to your company Show motivation to your company Show a structured way of working Communicate and be transparent to the right people in the organization Assign a sponsor from the top who should not be the project leader Involve entire management team
Organizational integration: the degree of having a shared vision and similar strategies towards the product within the organization(3). Organizational integration is needed in order to deliver and sell the product. If the organization has one shared vision, and the project is aligned with the vision, the purpose of the project will not be under debate. Additionally, stimulating this accelerator also has effect on the long term.
Organizational integration: Focus with the team on only a few projects Share one common goal within the team Arrange meetings to explain what your team is doing Arrange internal marketing to promote the idea to the rest of the organization
Marketing proficiency:
Marketing proficiency, the degree of proficiency with which a firm conducts its marketing activities(4). Marketing proficiency enables to better understand and serve the customer.
Wrap up…
Work together as a team Make the product tangible Communicate your ideas with your customer Define, communicate and organize the competencies needed within the team
Based on the findings of this research we believe that business managers can accelerate the product launch by focusing with an autonomous team on radical innovation projects which is going to be placed in a highly competitive environment. The checklists of the accelerators Organizational support, Organizational integration and Marketing proficiency shown above can be used by managers for realization. Sources: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
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