Week 9 Challenges Facing Consumer Goods

The consumer goods industries include food and beverage, apparel and footwear, nonfood consumer packaged goods, consumer durable goods and consumer electronics, which occupy a large portion of consumer expenditure, but they are not as profitable as they seem.

Developing successful consumer goods require the same process as other products: information collecting, market analysis, research and development, and post launch management. Therefore, different challenges may occur at each step. One specialty of consumer goods is that it does not depend on R&D as much as the electronic products. In other words, although consumer goods occupy the most shelf space, they are not so different in function, they may just have little different in appearance and quality. However, most consumer goods company indicated that they had little difficulty generating product ideas, less than 20 percent of those ideas resulted in products considered to be highly innovative. I doubt that it is because most of the new ideas of new product just have some tiny detail based on the existing products. On the other hand, consumer goods usually does not emphasize so much on R&D, thus as a real innovative idea comes up, the company’s current technology is not enough to support it.

Week3: Triz40

At first glance, the interface of this website looks simple and out of date. I can't find a lot of information about what TRIZ 40 is and how it works. However, I believe that almost each of us ever face some kind of contradictions in the work or study, like the balance of limited resource and quality assurance. This creativity tool provides us some practical solutions to this kind of contradiction. For example, I input speed and quality of substance in the blanks. This system gives me four solutions to solve it.

Week 10: The Age of the Consumer-Innovator

Innovation exists not only in the company but also comes from individuals. The understanding of the new product development originating from the company is fundamentally flawed because the customer is the final user of product, who knows about what he really needs better than the company. We all know that one method can't fit everyone. Today customerization and personal design can be found no matter in physical products like commodities and cars or in service. So the customer is the center of new product development. Sometimes the product meeing customer's particular need actually doesn't exist in the market so the only solution  is to design and matreialize the product. It's the history of skateboard and dishwasher cited in the article.