Dipl.-Oec. Florian Denker

New Product Idea Screening
The development of new and innovative products ia an essential drivers of a firm’s profitability and growth. However, the proficient evaluation of early-stage new product ideas poses a major challenge for research and practice alike. These early-stage ideas entail uncertainties that make their first evaluations extremely challenging.
In this context, the question of whether only individuals with high domain knowledge are able to proficiently evaluate such raw new product ideas or whether the importance of domain knowledge for this crucial task might be exaggerated is still unsettled. Especially with research arguing for outsourcing early idea evaluations to users or “the crowd”, it seems essential to develop a deeper understanding of the role of an individual’s domain knowledge in evaluating new product ideas.
To address this research gap, a quasi-experiment was conducted in which 333 evaluators with different levels of domain knowledge evaluated new product ideas with varying degrees of innovativeness. Foremostm, the results show that individuals with low domain knowledge overvalue the originality of ideas with low innovativeness and undervalue the use value and feasibility of more innovative (i.e., radical) ideas. Since these distortions in evaluations could lead to less innovative ideas being selected into a company’s innovation funnel, it seems highly important to employ evaluators who possess comprehensive domain knowledge in the evaluation of raw new product ideas. This conclusion has important implications for the selection of appropriate evaluators for the early-stage evaluation of raw new product ideas and sets clear boundaries for leveraging “the crowd” in an open evaluation setting.

• Denker, F., Eling, K. and Herstatt, C. (2016), The Role of Individuals’ Domain Knowledge in Evaluating Radical New Product Ideas, R&D Management Conference, Cambridge, UK.