New approaches to idea generation and consumer input in the product development process

Abstract

This thesis consists of five related essays which explore new approaches to help design successful and profitable new products. The primary focus is the front end of the process where the product development team is seeking improved input from customers and improved ideas for developing products based on that input. Essay 1 examines whether carefully tailored ideation incentives can improve creative output. The influence of incentives on idea generation is studied using a formal model of the ideation process. A practical, web-based, asynchronous "ideation game" is developed, allowing the implementation and test of various incentive schemes. Using this system, an experiment is run, which demonstrates that incentives do have the capability to improve idea generation, confirms the prediction from the theoretical analysis, and provides additional insight on the mechanisms of ideation. Essay 2 proposes and tests new adaptive question design and estimation algorithms for partial-profile conjoint analysis. The methods are based on the identification and characterization of the set of parameters consistent with a respondent's answers . This feasible set is a polyhedron defined by equality constraints, each paired-comparison question yielding a new constraint. Polyhedral question design attempts to reduce the feasible set of parameters as rapidly as possible. Analytic Center estimation relies on the center of the feasible set. The proposed methods are evaluated relative to established benchmarks using simulations, as well as a field test with 330 respondents. Essay 3 introduces polyhedral methods choice-based conjoint analysis, and generalizes the concept of D-efficiency to individual adaptation. The performance of the methods is evaluated

(cont.) using simulations, and an empirical application to the design of executive education programs is described. Essay 4 generalizes the existing polyhedral methods for adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis by taking response error into account in the adaptive design and estimation of choice-based polyhedral questionnaires. The validity of the proposed approach is tested using simulations. Essay 5 studies the impact of Utility Balance on efficiency and bias. A new definition of efficiency (M-efficiency) is also introduced, which recognizes the necessity to match preference questions with the quantities used in the ultimate managerial decisions.