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Thursday, December 05, 2013

Product Development Using Structured Analogies

Just received this from SAS.  Note that it is an ad and you have to provide information to get the background paper, have not done that yet.  Click here for more.  I am intrigued because we experimented with a similar approach a decade ago, and analogies are powerful ways to generate new product ideas.  May be something useful here.

" ... New Product Forecasting Using Structured Analogies

Learn about a new patent-pending approach that may be helpful in certain new product forecasting situations. Make manual overrides to the statistical forecasts, and get a better sense of the risks and uncertainties in new product forecasts through visualization of past new product introductions. ...  They describe it further:

SAS has a new patent-pending approach to NPF that combines the use of analogies with structured judgment. This "structured analogy" process for new product forecasting has six main steps:

Query step: Find a set of candidate products that have similar attributes to the new product.

Filter step: Manually remove inappropriate or outlier products from the set of candidate products.

Cluster step: Cluster the candidate products according to their sales pattern, and manually select the most appropriate cluster to serve as the surrogate products.

Model step: Select the most appropriate statistical model for the cluster of surrogate products, and extract the statistical model features.

Forecast step: Use the extracted statistical model features to forecast the new product. ... " 

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