Planning

Effective project planning is critical to implementing new product development strategies. In some cases new product development strategy initiation includes original research but in this case research actually resulted in the formulation of the new product concept. Ground breaking research undertaken at Victoria University (VU) showed that children wake up to smoke alarms with familiar voices much more easily than they do with traditional smoke alarms that 'beep'. VU Researcher Dorothy Bruck said: "One hundred percent of children tested have woken to the mother's voice message- played at 1am in the morning. This compares to only 57 percent wakening to the current smoke alarm signal, played at the same time of night and at the same volume." This ground breaking new product development research set the stage for KidSmart's intellectual property suite and drove our new product development strategies. From the start, we mapped out our performance requirements, usability strategies and product cost targets. It was also critical early on in the new product development process to identify component suppliers and production strategies for all major components including the actual smoke sensor.