Thursday, February 24, 2011

Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval



Creating Breakthrough Products: Innovation from Product Planning to Program Approval
Jonathan Cagan,Craig M. Vogel | 2001-11-01 00:00:00 | FT Press | 336 | Advertising
Transforms innovation from serendipity to science, giving you the tools for creating products that change the rules of the game and achieve significant competitive advantage.
Reviews
The textbook arrived in the condition that was stated and it also arrived in a timely manner.
Reviews
This was a very boring book. I was looking to be motivated into creating new products, but this was like reading a history book without addressing how to think outside the box.
Reviews
The seller was very prompt on his sending and delivery was on time. Most impressive the book was in very good condition for a used book. Congratulation my friend I like doing business with you.
Reviews
Great book, worth owning if you are a product designer or project manager. Excellent charts and graphs to support the ideas of the book.
Reviews
Although I agree with several of the concerns by other reviewers, I recommend this book for product developers because it offers usable information that can improve the liklihood of success for a new product.

First my concerns:

- There's too many unrelated topics,
- There's too many acronyms,
- It reads like a textbook, it's a little hard to read as it feels disjointed somewhat.

Now the things that I like and recommend:

- Great reviews of successful product case studies (I particularly liked the OXO product one),
- Although trite, their 2x2 matrix was quite interesting,
- Their emphasis on how to put "style" into your product (this is not really covered in many other books),
- Their concept of Product Opportunity Gaps (POG, whoops there's another acronym).

I think the authors, who are quite astute, should rewrite this book. I recommend that they boil down the material and rewrite the book thinking of it as an instruction book from them to some MBA/Engineer (Hewlitt/Packard) who's working out of his garage on some new product. They should not see this as a college text, or some book that's a supplementary reading for college. They have great material and great ideas, but it needs focused. They can completely drop Chapter 6 on Teams. Their Chapter 7 on Understanding User Needs seemed weak. They should drop the case studies in Chapters 8 and 9 and integrate that great material into the core text -- otherwise it's just too repetitive.

There was an excellent article about the authors in Fast Company magazine, July 2002. page 123. "How to Design the Perfect Product". I recommend reading that article as well.

These smart guys from Carnegie Mellon's design school have a unique approach to "Value is all about fulfilling fantasy" and their methodology for getting that into your product.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

Download this book!

Free Ebooks Download