Understanding New Product Life Cycles and Inventing
In marketing, educators often talk about the product life cycle. Usually displayed as a graph, it follows the sales vs. time throughout the life of a product. Once a product is launched, it starts off with little sales, and then it grows, gaining momentum until it hits its maturity before sales begin to decline. In an ideal situation there would be three products running through the cycle at any given point, so as one is at the verge of declining, another will be in its growth stage, while another is at its introduction stage. This is what many consider to be a healthy corporation.![[Product Life Cycle]](http://www.georgemdavison.com/uploaded_images/product_life_cycle-783029.gif)
However, for inventors and new product developers there is another aspect to this curve that no one talks about, and that’s the development life cycle and how it applies to the new product life cycle. It’s crucial for a company to roll out its next new product as the others crawl up the life cycle to maturity. A company planning for the future has at least three more products in the works in at least the research phase, the development phase and the ready-to-launch phase.
![[Product Life Cycle with Development Side for Inventors]](http://www.georgemdavison.com/uploaded_images/product_life_cycle-2-797072.gif)
Watching this closely, you’ll see the importance of inventing and new product development. While some organizations do their own inventing and R&D, others look for that next thing to drop in their ready-to-launch hopper. But R&D can be expensive for a company; that’s why it’s so crucial for an inventor to do as much of the development work ahead of time. It shows that you, the inventor, know what you’re doing and that you understand new product development.