TEST MARKETING

Rather than push a product onto market and lose a lot of money if it flops, you can test market your creation on a limited scale to see whether it appeals to people and what they'll pay for it. By test marketing a new product, you can:

1. Determine whether your product fits a market need that's not already met
2. Change the color, size, design, functionality or packaging to reflect
consumer response.
3. Find support from distributors and retailers interested in selling your
product.


Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

1. Make a prototype

Prospective buyers want to see a product in front of them before they order. What's more, you need to make sure the product does what it's intended to do and doesn't have usability issues.

Prototypes can be made from metal, plastic and other materials, and prototype manufacturers will advise you on how to lower manufacturing costs should you go ahead with production.

2. Find your audience

Focus your efforts on people who are likely to want what you're selling.

Companies such as Direct Opinions, Information Resources Inc. and ACNielsen's BASES can identify targeted focus groups for you(marketing research).

3. Bring product to the people

Before you try to interest distributors and retailers in a new product, consider presenting the product straight to the buying public to see whether there's interest.

I recommend: Exhibiting a new product at a trade show is a tried-and-true method of testing it directly with your target market. Hundreds of trade shows are held each year.
If you're selling a consumer product – particularly food, clothing, toys or crafts, you might try renting a booth at a state fair.
Farmers' markets offer other opportunities to test buyers' reactions to your new product — and you don't need to be selling fruit and veggies!

Hire a test marketing specialist

Depending on your product and where you plan to market it, you might not be able to show it personally or on a broad enough scale to judge public reaction.

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

* If manufacturing a couple of products is cost-prohibitive, use prototypes or mock-ups to show
the product to distributors, catalog buyers and trade-show visitors.
* Don't worry about losing money on test market sales. If the test doesn't succeed, you've likely
saved far more money that you would have spent.
* To encourage retailers to carry a test product, offer the product on consignment or promise a
full refund if the product doesn't sell after an agreed-upon deadline.

TOPIC 10: MARKETING & TYPE OF MARKET

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TOPIC 9: ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

TOPIC 8: SOURCE OF INNOVATION

TOPIC 7: ORGANISATION RESOURCES

From Patent to Profit

Mark Twain once wrote that "a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab and couldn't travel anyway but sideways or backwards". Let us look at the US - the mecca for patents. It is today, despite recent problems, the most powerful nation in the world. This is probably driven by its penchant for patents. The founding fathers, those who framed the American Constitution, saw the justification in giving monopoly for a limited time as a reward for invention. This was an incentive to create and encourage business for the new nation. For the first time in the history of the world, a constitutional instrument recognised that individuals had the right to protect their intellectual property (IP).

Thomas Jefferson, the third American president and the only other person to have also served as secretary of state and vice-president, was also the young nation's first patent commissioner. He spoke of patents as "locomotives that run industry". Little did he know that the patent laws that he put in place would propel the US to the status of global superpower in less than 180 years.

As most goods are offered on the open market, manufacturers can gain competitive advantage by preventing copycats. This may seem contrary to the concept of free market. But in truth, IP helps rather than hinders the economy by encouraging innovative work the real engine of growth.

With a patent, an inventor can control the design, manufacture, licensing, distribution and copying of his inventions. A patent is in effect a temporary monopoly over a specific device or process.
Patents are by nature competitive instruments - they prevent your competitors from practising your invention. They can be used to force competitors to change their products and marketing strategy. However, this assumes that the competitively valuable space is protected. Simply put: The purpose of patents is to keep others from duplicating your invention.

Benefits of a patent

• Marketing. Customers are always looking for the "next new thing". Patents represent "newness" as "novelty" is the key to successful patent applications. Patents also represent "R&D", which everyone likes. Patents are also third-party endorsements as they need to be vetted by the unbiased officials who man patent offices worldwide.

• Revenue source. Patents protect owners in terms of pricing and allow the product or service to fetch higher prices. This secures better revenue and profit.

• Bargaining chip. Owners of patents have better bargaining power when dealing with employees, competitors, customers, collaborators, reg-ulators and financial institutions as well as markets. This will be especially so when business becomes more knowledge-intensive.

• Industry control. Patents create monopolistic positions for owners. When used effectively, patents allow companies that own them control of a particular industry. This is the classic strategy of companies like IBM and Sony.

• Defending market niche. By creating a monopoly, patents enable companies that own superior abilities to defend niches in the market that they want to be strong in. This has been the strategy of pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

• Prevent being shut down by new markets and technology. Patents allow your company to be more resistant to challenges of technology obsolescence and market shifts that might shut you down. The richest man in the world understood that. In 2004, he set a new target for this company, Microsoft, to beat IBM in terms of patents filed.

Indeed, a cursory look at this July / August's issue of Fortune's Global 500 Rankings is quite revealing. American multinational companies lead with 153 followed by Japanese companies with 64. Japan is a patent-hungry nation as are the many European nations that figure strongly on the list. Looking at the Malaysian scenario, our national patent policy looks good on paper. But is it spurring national competitiveness which will turn us into a developed nation? This question needs a hard and honest answer. Or else, I see a blame game erupting as we get closer to 2020 and realise we are miles away from developed status.

Datuk Dr Rajen M is CEO of Holista Biotech Sdn Bhd

TOPIC 5 & 6 - INNOVATION PROCESS

TOPIC 4 - ORGANIZATIONAL INFRASTUCTURE

TOPIC 3: GENESIS OF INNOVATION

TOPIC 2: TYPE OF INNOVATION

TOPIC 1: PERSPECTIVE ON INNOVATION

COURSE ROAD MAP

Create, Own, and Sell a Bold New Idea

Let’s face it. Many of the survival ideas for business owners and managers in times of crisis we are hearing today can be summarized in just a few lines:

• Don’t stop investing
• Cut smart
• Help your customers
• Listen to your employees
• Have your organizatilon ready to charge when the economic tundra begins to thaw

So I perked up at Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s unique idea, expressed in her blog.

“Announce and own a grand concept.”

Sure, you might not be able to do anything about it now, she says. “But you will be well-prepared when markets recover. Ideas are cheap to begin to articulate and brand — and priceless once established.”

She points to IBM’s announcement in early November of its Smart Planet initiative, a proposal for Big Blue to lead a national forum on how technology such as smart networks can solve intractable problems like global warming. “With a modest communications effort,” Kanter writes, “IBM can put the ’smart planet’ idea on public policy agendas and ‘own’ an idea ripe for action whenever recovery occurs.”

Barack Obama is certainly taking this lesson to heart. Even before being sworn in to office he is building support (not always successfully) for a number of initiatives that would have had him laughed out of politics just an few months ago: trillion-dollar deficits; expansive/expensive public works programs; bailouts/loans for the financial and auto industries. Clearly Obama takes to heart the observation that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Your idea doesn’t have to be as bold as Smart Planet or as risky as massive bailouts. It could be a plan for a new department initiative, a rethinking of a company goal or value, a new method for encouraging employee ideas around big problems. Now is the time to identify it, own it, sell it, and be ready to push it forward when the time is right.

Presentation

Assessment

Assessments for this subject is as follows:

Assessments	Percent
Innovation & Marketing Project	50%
Quiz	10%
Final Exam	40%
Total	100%

News 1

MSC Malaysia Succeeds In Creating Bumi Technopreneurs

Friday, 22/02/2008

Bernama

Tengku Noor Shamsiah Tengku Abdullah

MSC Malaysia has succeeded in its mission to bring about greater Bumiputera involvement in the information & communications technology (ICT) field through its programmes. Chief executive officer Datuk Badlisham Ghazali of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the agency responsible for developing MSC Malaysia, said in the two years since the Bumiputera Technopreneurs Development (BITE) and Technopreneur Academy (TAP) programmes were introduced, 464 MSC Malaysia status Bumiputera companies have emerged among the 1,900 MSC Malaysia status firms. While small in number when compared to the overall total, this is in fact a 40 percent increase from previously, he stressed. According to Badlisham, MDeC has taken several measures to ensure that MSC Malaysia contributes significantly to the goal of making Malaysia a developed nation based on a knowledge economy by 2020. "Towards this end, one focus of MSC Malaysia is to increase the Bumiputera participation in the ICT sector through various programmes that not only evolve young Bumiputera entrepreneurs but also improve the competitiveness of the existing Bumiputera ICT firms," he told Bernama in an interview in his office here. Badlisham said BITE and TAP were established in 2005 with the collaboration of several other parties to encourage greater Bumiputera entrepreneurship. He pointed out that besides content, creative multimedia is becoming the focus of Bumiputera entrepreneurs, especially among the younger ones, such as Les Copaque Sdn Bhd, which has created animation for the international market, like Geng The Series and Upih & Lilin. Les Copaque, formed by four Multimedia University of Malaysia(MMU) graduates, has won international competitions with its animation products. To unearth young talent, Badlisham said, MSC Malaysia has incubators such as those at Kuala Lumpur Sentral to help draw up business plans, obtain pre seed funding and content development, in line with the objective of getting more Bumiputeras and graduates to move into ICT entrepreneurship. MSC Malaysia Cybercity in Penang, according to him, has set up a Master Incubator Centre with the cooperation of the Penang Development Corporation (PDC) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). It already has a Business Lab and a Tech Lab. At the pre-university level, MSC Malaysia has a campaign promoting ICT as a career of choice ongoing since last year to encourage school leavers to pick ICT courses when they enter universities and to ease any concerns that there are few job opportunities in ICT. Badlisham said that under its technopreneur development programme, cooperation has been established with the Entrepreneur & Cooperative Development Ministry and the various state development corporations to help evolve and encourage ICT entrepreneurship. TAP began in 2005 in six states - Perak, Johor, Melaka, Terengganu, Sabah and Sarawak. He said that in its second phase, TAP is expanding to Penang, Kedah, Pahang, Perlis, Negeri Sembilan and Kelantan. On pre seed funding, Badlisham said the government has allocated RM80 million to help Bumiputera entrepreneurs, and so far RM14 million has been disbursed to 42 companies. Also, the government and MDeC are aiming to create at least 400 Bumiputera ICT entrepreneurs in the next five years under a programme that has been contracted to Alam Teknokrat Sdn Bhd (Skali).