The purpose of the present project is to identify the ways that may be used to select the product concept of the ‘SolarWinds project. There is a set of traditionally accepted ways to produce this selection that is a complex and multi-staged undertaking. At first, it is very important to stipulate the number of alternatives for the concept selection, as the appearance of every new notion is always accompanied by certain hardships. It is thus necessary to obtain a clear idea of what the type of product should be, to what characteristics it should correspond, and what qualities it should possess. In another way, the creators of the project may risk the success of their undertaking if they fail to understand the initial profile of the product that may prove to be successful.
The process of selecting the concept of the product first of all lies in the process of limiting the number of alternatives. It is not that good if the number of alternatives is either large or small, but the creators and concept managers should try to choose an average number of concepts to create sensible competition between the alternatives and to ensure the reasonable integration of qualities in the process of the final choice of one concept. Thus, the process of rejection of excessive alternatives should be the first – as in the case with ‘solarinds’, the marketers of the product should, first of all, think about the issues of price and complexity in handling.
The product is potentially successful because of its easiness to use and low cost. It, however, does not provide the full supply of light to the household that will use it, as a result, is not the most profitable purchase in terms of choosing the appliance for usage if the household wants to economize. The market, as the creators themselves had stated, is too narrow to create an expensive or advanced appliance, so the main emphasis is made on the price and absence of complexity of usage.
The concept of the product profile was initially selected according to the external decision of the project creators. The product champion should not be chosen according to the personal experience because of the recognized common need of consumers to receive the high-quality device that would be able to provide the households with light at night and would accumulate it during the daytime. The necessity of launching the ‘solarinds’ project was dictated not only by the personal pursuit of profit or success by the authors of the project: they were guided by the common public’s necessity and plenty of opportunities for generating the solar energy by the device under the conditions and specificity of the Australian climate.
The creators of the ‘solarinds’ series stipulate that the appliance can be narrowly used – it may not be the source of energy for some other appliances, and it as well cannot be utilized as an electricity source. Instead of all these functions offered by other solar energy generators providers the ‘solarinds’ device can only be used as a source of light at night.
However, the project managers explicitly explained the way the appliance may turn out to be highly beneficial for any household with small children or for households that want to secure themselves from the burglars who may get into the house under the cover of night. The product may potentially be applied for a set of other purposes, but at the present moment, the main emphasis is made on the defined narrow circle of opportunities.
It is hard to say whether multi-voting has been applied as a source of deciding terms of selecting the concept of ‘solarinds’ – from the description provided by the creators it comes that the team is small and close. Thus, it is possible to suppose that multi-voting was the initiating point of launching the new product line and of creating the ‘solarinds’ project in general.
Intuition could have also been applied as a powerful source of decision-making if one can suppose that the independent investigation of the situation with the power consumption in Australia and consideration of problems Australian consumers face from the financial and ecological point of view made someone come round thinking about the alternative source of energy that could be taken from the Sun.
No matter how the decision to launch the product line and to shape the profile of the product was made, it is necessary to define the course of action that was taken to select the product concept in a narrower sense. Certainly, it was of vital importance to create a decision matrix and to define the elements of the concept that have to be given chief priority, and which may be neglected in the course of the product creation and marketing: price, the complexity of the construction, details, target market, etc.
This way it will be possible to establish the rating of the concept characteristics that possess lower or higher importance and to integrate the vision of the product into the final stage of creation of the concept profile:
The team could have decided to go with the top two (or more) concepts. Concepts should be prototyped and tested for customer feedback (133).
Surely one should perform the economic analysis of the product that is going to be launched – preliminary estimates show its cost efficiency, but the costs for servicing and establishment of the production line seem to be rather high, thus showing the inconsistency of calculations:
From: SolarWinds. Modern Electronics, 2009, p. 4.
Benchmarking of competitive products maybe not be necessary because the creators themselves admitted the absence of competitors in the given field. As a result, innovation may become an important advantage in the sphere of electronics. For the sake of innovation, it is sensible even to sacrifice a certain amount of other advantages, maybe the level of complexity in handling the appliance, the range of usage, or the price of the appliance, as innovation has long ago proven to be highly beneficial for the producer, attracting much more attention of the consumers.
However, every company should be interested in continuous improvement, so the main objectives should be thoroughly discussed and analyzed. It’s essential to use objective criteria in the course of evaluation of the product concept, which may become the key to the success of launching the new product line discussed.
Works Cited
Karl T. Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development, 4th Edition, Irwin McGraw-Hill, 2007.
Solarinds. Modern Electronics, 2009, 4 pp.