I have to admit. I’m going against my own religion. This week I had a scoping session with an app developer, to create an app for the greatest idea in the world. Fortunately it’s my own idea!

As an IBP manager I’m daily in contact with marketeers on their great innovation ideas. I make sure they follow the rules of the stage gate process, where based on agreed criteria we test the ideas on their validity, before we move to the next phase and assign more resources to develop the idea. We prioritize opportunities and risk weight them based on success rates to decide how much of this idea we want to commercialize and add it our financial forecast. P&G might have a success rate of 50% versus NPD business case. The success rate in most FMCG companies doesn’t reach 30%.

In the product review, one of the meeting in the IBP cycle. We look at projects and available resources and decide if we have to re-prioritize and allocate resources differently. In the monthly Exec IBP meeting, we might ask executive for extra resources outside of our budget, if we really believe this is the right thing to do for the company in the long term.

This very rigid process I manage or am part of, is not applicable for my own idea for a new supply chain app. The only thing I know is for my new idea is:

– apps are adopted at twice the speed of the internet

– people spend already more time in apps then on the internet

– the 3 year young app industry is already worth the odd 16 billion$

– last year, 3 times more apps were sold then the year before

I wrote some thoughts about social media and the supply chain in a previous blog: https://supplychaintrends.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/social-media-in-the-supply-chain/

This gave me some ideas for the supply chain apps I’m working on now. What I have been preaching to my colleagues and to businesses on NPD processes for years are all of a sudden not applicable to myself. Will my idea and NPD be successful? I don’t know, but I now much better understand the excitement of a marketer and his/her idea and can show more empathy when we’re about to kill an idea!