Innovation Insights: When should you start thinking about replacing an existing offering?
Jan 13, 2025
The good news is that the product lifecycle management is a tool that can trigger proactive innovation management. There are many more tools involved in the Front End of Innovation phase.
Let’s differentiate two parts of a product’s lifecycle:
- From the moment an idea for innovation is included in the definition phase, the innovation development and market launch phases will follow. All these steps need to be considered in the innovation cycle.
- Once the innovation hits market, from its introduction phase, followed by growth, maturity, and decline, all these phases will be part of the market cycle.
Many organizations use the trigger to initiate an innovation project when current product sales are declining, such as products 1&2 on the chart. At this point, they realize that they will need to replace those offerings, and so, speed is now of the essence.
However, a proactive approach would instead trigger an innovation project when the product sales hit late maturity, such as products 3 and 4 on the chart. And of course, after maturity, there is always the decline.
By triggering the innovation proactively, it allows innovators to do their job right. In the case of the ideal scenario, products 1&2 are declining because the sales are transferring to products 6&7, which are growing.
Also, projects A&D are being developed to eventually replace products 3&4.
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