Outstanding Product Success Rate for IDC

Working in the product innovation industry where the failure rate of new products can be disproportionately high, IDC is delighted to report that following a recent audit, 91% of IDC's development work was on products that have gone on to be commercially successful. This figure, a result of project analysis of IDC’s projects from 2012 - 2017, is exceptional. Developing and launching new products can be risky - according to Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen, out of 30,000 new consumer products launched annually, up to 80% of them fail - so it's important to maximise the chances of success.

One of the reasons that IDC is so effective at designing successful products is that it has almost 50 years experience, designing thousands of products, to create its own four stage innovation process backed up by a robust ISO certified quality system. This is a flexible process which creates a bespoke plan for each unique project to direct the creativity towards the end goal and reminds teams about what they need to achieve at different stages of the design. From the onset, the process looks at user needs with the aim of developing innovative solutions.

IDC’s MD, Stephen Knowles, believes keeping the user at the heart of the design process is essential for product success. He explains, “IDC has been designing products for nearly 50 years and this has enabled us to develop a really successful design process. The process inspires innovation by feeding user insight into every stage of the development. This is then mated with all the other factors, from technology and patents, to materials, manufacturing and of the course the cost considerations. This means we can design products with complete user understanding and actually go beyond expectations for products to become commercially successful market leaders.”

Despite this high level of success, IDC is not complacent and is using its vast database of project experience to further analyse what factors, in addition to an effective design process, are most influential in determining what makes a successful product. This will be used to predict a product’s success and feed this knowledge back into the development process in order to further improve the outcomes.