Idea Generation
Idea generation is an essential phase for the sport industry because in this phase new ideas are being created. The main sources for a new product/idea come from employees, distributors, competitors, vendors, R&D and consultants. Ideas are drawn from customers, there will be some kind of interaction between the organisation and the customers such as observations and surveys about customers problems and dreams for a sport product.
“Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea” article says, when a new product is starting to be developed then many different alternative concepts are being considered before selecting the idea that will become the new idea generation. “The success of idea generation in innovation usually depends on the quality of the best opportunity identified.” (Girotra, Terwiesch and Ulrich, 2010) Organisations are not looking for good ideas but for one outstanding idea. When an organisation decided what idea is the best they use a creative problem-solving process including, attribute listing, morphological analysis, reverse assumption analysis, new contexts and mind mapping.
The tennis organisation Head has joined with IDEO to design tennis racquets specifically for female recreational players. The racquet is designed to look smaller because the bigger the racquet the bigger the sweat spot and the easier it is to hit the ball. Additionally they designed a integrip-feature, which means that the grip fits perfectly for anatomy of the female hand. “In the heart of the racquet that conceal the extended strings, allowing the Airflow’s wielder to avoid the stigma of inexperience without sacrificing performance”(Ideo.com, 2014) After the racquet was developed the target market confirmed the effectiveness of the new features. Head created an racquet line ‘Airflow’, which successful embrace the female player market and the technological advances in tennis racquet design. Head saw a gap in the market and used this opportunity to create a new idea generation.
A new sport which would be developed is unicycle polo. Unicycle polo could be necessary because polo alone is a very expensive sport due to the fact that you need a hours and need to care for the horse so it is very time consuming and expensive. However, many people who would like to play polo but do not have necessary resources. For unicycle polo there will be two teams, and each team has a goal. The people will sit on the unicycle and try to hit the ball with their polo sticks into the goal. This game will be played on grass. But the players will need to where a helmet, knee pads and elbow pads to make the game safe for the players. The players are also not allowed to tackle each other.
Another new generation product could be trampoline long jump. This product could be necessary because long jump is a very popular event. But many people do not have the necessary jumping power. This would give many people the chance to be able to jump far.
References
Girotra, K., Terwiesch, C. and Ulrich, K. (2010). Idea generation and the quality of the best idea. Management Science, 56(4), pp.591--605.
Ideo.com, (2014). Airflow Tennis Racquet | IDEO. [online] Available at: http://www.ideo.com/work/airflow-tennis-racquet/ [Accessed 28 Oct. 2014].
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ReplyDeleteYou have used a suitable structure throughout i.e. the first third providing an academic foundation, the second third giving an example from a stated source, and the third section providing your own ideas - good. Perhaps add a little further specificity to the academic basis of idea generation by identifying additional components of relevance. The second section is addressed well, but do give examples of new sport/physical activity formats that have been successful e.g. T20 cricket. I like your idea, but check the UCI website as I believe it already exists. Nevertheless, there is still potential for development. This is a good start to Assignment 2a.
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