Coming up with ideas for retail like new products or service concepts is the usual route taken by businesses to keep themselves from being eased out by competitors. Being able to move forward towards more business growth also requires companies to instill a culture of excellence in innovation among their people.
Suffice it to say that what any business owner truly invests in to be able to have a ready arsenal of brilliant ideas are its people. People are the source of ideas and whatever these amazing ideas are could only be validated later on as marketable business ideas for the retail cycle.
Initial Considerations
Business owners, creative circles, engineers and design thinkers deal with ideas from user research and marketing points of view. How practical an idea could be and how marketable it could potentially be once lobbied into the retail cycle are the primary considerations that such people take when ideas are brought to the table. By being practical, this takes into account the technical feasibility and manufacturability of ideas. By being marketable, this means that ideas must be capable of being mass produced economically so that they could be sold to an existing or potential market as reasonably priced items.
For ideas to be found executable for business, entrepreneurs and their innovative people must therefore be likewise capable of knowing not only the right solutions but also — all the right questions to ask themselves. Being so enables engineers and design thinkers to truly justify all the ideation, creation, testing, vetting and perfecting of ideas. Whatever new products or service concepts result from these activities henceforth validate the technology that has made these new things possible.
It would be best for business owners and their talented crop of innovators to ask themselves the following questions in the pursuit of tech validation:
Does the idea, in the form of technology, recipe, or formula work? For any idea to be truly good, amazing and brilliant, it must first work. At least at a demonstrable level that could be presented to the right people, a prototype should be created to make the idea a tangible or tactile one. New invention prototypes must be capable of functioning so that all working systems contained in it could be witnessed as truly functional and capable of performing what it promises in the blueprint.
Could you source sufficient supply of materials or ingredients? Even when just into the prototype stage of a new business idea, it would be best to prepare for an eventual go signal for mass production or service execution. The sufficiency or scarcity of materials that would be required for the production and marketing of a commercialized idea affect the way these are priced for retail advantageously. You could be able to assess how economically you could mass-produce a commercialized idea by knowing about supply sufficiency.
Could you meet production demand if ever? You could reliably find out about this by first assessing your financial capability to bankroll the new idea and then being sure about having the right infra and manpower to make mass production possible. Mass-market retail is anticipatory and therefore requires companies a certain amount of supply guarantee for retailers to consider. Companies could also go a step ahead with how they could assure inventory especially when online or telecom retail gets into the picture. Business-to-business transactions and those involving individual customers made via RingCentral telecom, for example, tend to exert pressure on production volume.
Is your current production capacity sufficient? If you have the assembly line infra and the human resources needed for it, no need for you to worry. However, if you lack on both counts, it’s time to consider some expansion in those areas. Think of it as an investment in people and ideas plus a justifiable reason to grow the business with something exciting and innovative.