The Next-Gen Product Convenience Challenge

Due to the speed of product launches and updates in the Internet era, companies no longer have the luxury of reflecting on product and service convenience at a time of their choosing. They must think continually about what benefits every product in their portfolio offers and what its costs are in terms of adoption barriers. One-off convenience analysis must become convenience "kaizen": Firms must foster an ongoing culture of improving product convenience by maximizing benefits and minimizing barriers across products at every stage of the life cycle. For revolutionary breakthrough products, the convenience challenge is even greater than for evolutionary, incremental changes to product models. For these new-generation products, firms must think even further into the future. Otherwise, firms will continue to launch products with fabulously high benefits but that nevertheless will continue to fail spectacularly due to the tremendous barriers that undermine those benefits.