Predicting Success

Program Overview

Individuals who lead products and services development know that the success of new offerings is uncertain. To address uncertainty, leaders use various methods, such as customer insights and market research, phased development models, and placing bets on a portfolio of emerging possibilities. However, in certain conditions, these methods can produce highly unreliable outcomes.

This program is designed to increase leaders’ ability to assess novel ideas and examine the success trajectory across various stages of a new product launch. Participants explore new ways of thinking about innovation management, especially in unconventional markets where radical uncertainties prevail.

Taught by experts in innovation management, Predicting Success exposes participants to the latest research, best practices, and opportunities to reflect critically on one’s approach to leading innovation projects.

What You Learn

Influence Success: Diffusion of Innovation

• Understand the factors that lead to the diffusion of new ideas and assess whether the diffusion of innovation might be predictable.
• Discover how dominant designs emerge and how to manage when they do.

Forecast the market

• Discern whether online and social data can replace traditional approaches to forecasting market success.
• Understand the problems of correlation and causation and experimental approaches to market forecasting.

Practice customer centricity

• Examine the shift from a product-centric business model to a customer-centric model.
• Leverage the relationship between market valuation and customer equity.

Apply predictive analytics

• Explore the deployment of AI in predicting market needs and designing solutions.
• Understand the marketing opportunities provided by the availability of big data, and examine how companies are using big data and predictive analytics to both sell existing products and develop new ones.

Predict Success through simulation

• Diagnose the problems associated with product or service development in rapidly growing firms.
• Apply a stage-gate process in developing products.

Design innovative products or services

• Critically assess the value of early consumer feedback in product development.
• Manage the development of new-product projects in a highly uncertain environment.

Balance experimentation and performance

• Understand how disruptive new paradigms arise, manage complexity and navigate change – building in and on diversity.

Develop your strategic foresight

• Diagnose three classes of futures (what will/could/should happen) and learn to act on emerging trends that relate to a company’s long-term success. 
• Practice strategizing how preferred futures could be achieved.