Guidelines for Assignments in Business and Services Innovation

General Guidelines for Assignment 1 Write one page proposal about an interesting opportunity of a new product. Explain who would the potential customers of your new product, why it is interesting and why it has the feasibility to be manufactured. Feel free to use pictures/slides to illustrate your thoughts (similarly as the examples of previous projects done by MBA students at INSEAD). There should be a demonstrable market for the product. One good way to verify a market need is to identify existing products that meet the need. Your product need not be a variant of an existing product from your daily life, but the market need addressed by your product should be clearly evident. The product does not have to have a tremendous economic potential, but should at least be an attractive opportunity for a small firm. Ideally, the product should be a material good and not a service (in exceptional cases, you can present an opportunity on services after getting Professors permission). Although many of the ideas in the course apply to services (e.g., customer needs and product architecture), many do not (e.g., design for assembly). The product should require no basic technological breakthroughs. (Yes, a more compact airbag would be a nice, but can you do it without inventing a new chemical?) We do not have time to deal with large technological uncertainties. You should have access to more than 5 potential lead users of the product (more than 10 would be nice). I will exclude those opportunities that do not conform to the above guidelines before the individual presentation. The submission of Assignment 1 written report is due on April 18th, 2012. Failure of attending the individual presentation (due to either no submission or exclusion by me) will lead to zero point for individual project (assignment 1)

A few more hints: Save any highly proprietary ideas for another context; we will be quite open in discussing the projects in class and do not wish to be constrained with sensitive information. Most products are really not very well designed. We are continually amazed at the seemingly poor quality of common products (utility knives, garlic presses, and ice cream scoops, for example). Our experience is that if you pick almost any product satisfying our project guidelines, you will be able to develop a product that is superior to everything currently on the market. Some Product Examples YES hand tool backpacking accessory solid state circuit breaker (probably tape measure garlic press ski waxer roach trap bike rack requires new technology) sculpture, art, fashion apparel (probably lack required design expertise) antigravity material (beyond the reach of this course) NO MBA insurance (not a discrete

manufactured product)

Individual Presentation (Part of Assignment 1) Everyone has 2 minutes to present his/her proposal of new product opportunity to the class. I will stop your presentation if it goes beyond 2 mins limit. After presentations, everyone will vote for five most interesting opportunities.

The individual presentation is scheduled on April 24th, 2012 13:30 15:00 The five selected opportunities will be allocated to five groups as team project. The creator of a selected idea has the priority to use his/her own idea for his/her team project. The creators of five most interesting opportunities will get 100% individual project score or 15% of final grade.

Assignments 2 and 3 Both assignments take the form of written report. The Assignment 2 should be no longer than 2 pages and the Assignment 3 should be no longer than 4 pages on an A-4 size paper. Each assignment weighs 7.5% of your final grade (15% in total). I will grade your submission and return it to you one week after your submission. I will also photocopy the best assignment handed in each time and distribute a copy to each team. We grade the assignments 2 and 3 each on a scale of 0 to 10. I dont give grades of 0 through 4 (part of the psychology of grading). A 7.5 is defined as "meeting our expectations for the assignment." A 10 corresponds to an excellent job by a professional team. Assignment 2 is due on May 22nd, 2012 and Assignment 3 is due on May 25th, 2012.

Assignment 4: Final Group Presentation and Prototypes The final group presentation is scheduled on the last two sessions and weighs 40% of your final grade. Each group has 25 minutes to present their new product to the class. In the final group presentation, each group needs to present a coherent story about their product. The group presentation should include a summary of opportunity identification, analysis of customer needs, target specifications, concept selection and a detailed implementation plan. Each group is not required to product a physical prototype, but

bringing it to class (even a very rough and simple physical prototype) is absolutely a big plus for your final grading. Ideally this prototype would be both a "looks like" and a "works like" prototype. If you decide to make a physical prototype, use simplest material you can find, even if it is made of cardboard or foam, in order to impose some measure of physical realism on the project experience. Final group presentation is scheduled on May 29th, 2012 9:00 12:00.