Radical Product Innovation for Disruptive Radar Technology

The BIA project Radical Product Innovation for Disruptive Radar Technology combines development of advanced technology with new methods for innovative product development and evaluation of product ideas. The main purpose is to reduce risk and time-to-mark et for radical innovations. The partners in the project are Novelda AS, Colicot AS, Eker Design As, and NTNU. By combining rapid prototyping and continuous user involvement from the start, the risk of investing in developments that are not accepted by t he user / market is significantly reduced. Another benefit of this approach is that the innovation process itself will be more efficient and transparent. The first revision of the technical platform has been realized along with product design mock-ups for user evaluation and exploration of applications. The project has resulted in two specific product ideas and hardware prototypes which have been transferred to pilot produkt development. The product under final development are sleep monitor and occupancy sensor. The products offer a very high sensitivity detecting extremely small motions enabling totally new products in the market. End products are currently under development in close collaboration with pilot customers and end-users.

One of the major challenges when bringing new technology and innovations to the marketplace is the long time needed to develop them into profitable products. Very often disruptive innovations representing the main enabling technology of an end-market prod uct only end up with a very small portion of the total generated product value. In addition most customers use significant longer time than expected to develop finished products very often caused by lack of competence on bridging the gap between a technol ogy innovation and a final product. In this project new tools and methods based on Radical New Product Development (RNPD) principles will be developed to enable Novelda AS and other technology companies to generate, evaluate and select the right product i deas and concepts in the fussy front end of RNPD. At the same time the product cases introduced and refined throughout the project will represent disruptive innovations from a product perspective. Thus the new innovations and R&D results from the project will be both RNPD methodologies and physical products. The fundamental idea in the project is to start with value analysis workshops and tools for generating customer insight generating a list of good candidate products, all based on the Novelda radar pl atform and pre-validated with respect to market need. During the project, RNPD methodology will be applied in an iterative process to end up with the best products and at the same time optimize and re-evaluate the methodology and processes.