New Products Start by Viewing Future

"The future ain't what it used to be . ". --Yogi Berra. Getting a view of what the future might be--no matter how slowly it may arrive--is an important way of beginning the process of developing new products. This was reinforced by a panel of industry experts at The Conference Board's annual Growth and Innovation Conference, January 30-31 in New York City. The panel, which I moderated, included Mary Jo Cook of Clorox, Rob Kumpf of Bayer BioMaterials, Ron Pierantozzi of Air Products, and Vik Prabhu of DuPont. These companies each use different methods to identify emerging trends that are important in their businesses, and to incorporate the insights into their innovation projects. What Is a Trend? Just as different companies define innovation in different ways, many companies define the term "trend" differently. They all have a common feature, however--a trend is a forecast of the future based on information and activities that are happening today. Predicting trends successfully can be important for companies in rapidly changing businesses but, as our panelists observed, it's very difficult to get trend forecasting right. Catching a trend in the right way is like catching a wave in surfing--if your company has the right innovation at the right time, you can create whole new businesses and market segments. Too early, however, and the innovation will languish; too late, and others will have captured much of the market. Our panelists discussed a wide range of ways in which they both define and identify trends. Here's a quick rundown of what they do. Clorox--Identifying Lifestyle Trends For some companies, a trend may be embodied in a memorable phrase that serves as an umbrella for a variety of activities and purchases. Back in the 1990s, Faith Popcorn, a futurist and the founder of boutique consultancy BrainReserve, identified a trend she labeled "cocooning. " She defined "cocooning" as the desire of many people to insulate or hide themselves from the normal social environment. Companies supported this trend by providing a range of products to meet this emerging desire. As a consumer products company, Clorox is also focused on these lifestyle trends. Mary Jo Clark, the vice president of sustainability and innovation for Clorox, described a process of trend identification in which Clorox asked its providers of market research--companies like Roper, GDR, ProductScan, and Information Resources, Inc.--to help it tease out patterns from the information it collected. There's a formal group at Clorox--called Market Insights--that handles this interaction for the company. This has been the way that Clorox has gotten its consumer information for many years, and it's an approach that is similar across many consumer goods companies. More recently, Clorox has established a corporate new ventures group that has an explicit focus on new ideas. As the group looks at new products across the world, it begins to synthesize these into trends. These trends are then discussed internally with Clorox business units, with the goal of identifying some general patterns and trends relating to household activities. Cook described two kinds of trends that Clorox sees as important in its business currently: * "Help me" describes the increasing desire on the part of many households to have outside companies take charge of more activities that have traditionally been done in the house. As Cook noted: ". think about a child's birthday party. Years ago, you might bake a cake from scratch. Then you might use Betty Crocker, then you might buy the cake at your local grocery store, and now you go to Chuck E. Cheese and outsource the whole thing. So the whole idea of what it means to have a birthday cake or a birthday party can really change as you go through that trend. " * "Home is where you are" reflects the increasing desire of consumers to personalize whatever space they are in, ranging from their vehicles to their workplace to their living quarters. …