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New Product Screening - TELECOMM: A Knowledge-Based approach for Screening Product Innovations

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By Sudha Ram and Sundaresan Ram.
In determining whether, when, and how to bring new products to market, managers must contend with uncertainty and complexity. Innovations tend to create all kinds of disruptions in companies--in financial outlays, technical processes, operations, and even personnel policies. Careful planning at the outset can reap growth, profitability, and organizational learning; poor planning can result in an expensive failure and deter future innovation efforts. Since only one in seven new product ideas ultimately succeeds in the market, managers have a stake in finding a methodology for reliably evaluating new product and service ideas.

TELECOMM, an expert system for screening new products in the telecommunications industry, is an example of such a methodology. Its purpose is to help telecommunications firms decide whether to approve, reevaluate, or reject new product ideas. It also identifies customer and corporate barriers that must be overcome to successfully launch the product.

Systems like TELECOMM provide a structured approach for making informed new product decisions and promise important benefits for researchers and managers. For example, despite the high rate of new product failure, there is little understanding of causes and possible cures of these failures. By formalizing an organization's knowledge and reasoning powers, TELECOMM can enhance understanding of the problems that arise during the new product screening process, thus pointing the way toward better planning and more efficient use of resources. While TELECOMM is designed to serve telecommunication firms, its development has value for managers in a wide variety of industries. It can serve as a model for creating marketing implications in areas ranging from consumer products to industrial services.

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