Facts is that Mid 2008 the so called subprime financial crisis ignite a major financial downturn that beginning on 2009 start biting the real economy.
This crisis is acting in wages model and is and will span across all business areas, everyone all around the word is talking and now fearing heavily about economy crisis and recession, while even the economist seems not to know how to interpret and how to manage, but despite this non transparent phase what we know is that this crisis will come to an end and that will heavily re-model the economic model from ground-up significantly why ?
Because it is a global symmetric shock, the impact is on all markets (emerging and established economies) it is horizontal in impacting all social classes it is so depth that will remodel the consumer physiology in a solid and long term mode.
All is unclear but it true that this will come to an end and that whoever will be able to faster into interpretation of those changes will gain a significant competitive advantage being able to get into a faster growing that will even accelerate when the market will rebound, you plant your seeds in recessions, and reap the benefits when the economy comes back.
Take, for example, the recession of 1973-74. It was then that the leadership of the fast-food hamburger industry was established. And it has changed little since.
The common denominator is that the change whatever will be is useable today, you have to watch the space at 360 degree and you need tools processes and procedure that enable and foster this capacity within your organization.
The management of NPD (new product development) process is a key in ability to stay ahead of the curve when the new trends will emerge; lack of an established tested solution will condemn to a slower relative speed and decline in market quotes.
It is key to note that the NPD process itself will evolve and change much faster than during business as usual time, initially the focus will be on vanilla cost-save in product design and production, this push will retroactively come from your supply chain process.
But sooner the focus will slightly change into cost control after the restructuring of organization will have delivered the short term saving to allow organization survival, merges and some acquisition will contribute to push on tools to manage NPD and product portfolios in a more effective ways.
At some point in time the focus will presumably shift again and when the crisis will come to an end the NPD basis will move to manage product trials, the cardinality of those market tests will explode since the exit from economical crisis will be asymmetric; not all the economies and not all the consumers segments will start again to investigate and test new products; new trends and new needs will growth in non controlled and somehow chaotic model hard to predict.
In this last phase of crisis a large product portfolio with the associated tools and functionalities to assess and leverage these products against multidimensional grid (geo-markets by segments) will be a key competitive advantage to gain market share and to capture new consumer’s trends.
Massimo Antoniello
