Product Innovation and Development

This paper presents the development of an initial best practice framework for New Product Development (NPD) within the Standard Chartered Bank, Cote d’Ivoire. The framework discussed in this paper identifies business best practices for every stage in the NPD process.

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Product Innovation and Development
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Product Innovation and Development
A fruitful innovation and development of a new product is vital to the long-lasting continued
existence of the Standard Chartered Bank, Cote d’Ivoire. With the increasing levels of
competition in the banking industry coupled by the shortening products lifecycles, pressure has
been imposed on every bank to innovate more effectively (Grasshoff & Coppola, 2019).
Standard Chartered Bank, for example, develops various types of new products ranging from
minor improvement of existing products to completely new projects. This Bank’s successful
development of new products can be attributed to its business best practices such as efficient
processes, good relationships with outsider parties such as clients, competitors, suppliers, and
distributors, and introduction of useful or relevant products (Standard Chartered , 2018). This
paper presents the development of an initial best practice framework for New Product
Development (NPD) within the Standard Chartered Bank, Cote d’Ivoire. The framework
discussed in this paper identifies business best practices for every stage in the NPD process.
The NPD process comprises of the various activities conducted by Standard Chartered Bank,
Cote d’Ivoire when developing and launching a new product. Whenever Standard Chartered
introduces a new product, it goes through a sequence of steps, beginning with the initial product
idea or concept that is evaluated, developed, tested and then launched for clients to consume it.
This series of activities can as well be said as a sequence of information collection and
assessment phases all tailored to serve their clients in the best way possible (Abuya, 2019).
Actually, as the new product progresses, the bank’s administration becomes more and more well-
informed (or less doubtful) concerning the product and may evaluate and re-examine its first
decision to embark on launch or development (Kazeem, 2018). Following this procedure of

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gathering information and evaluating it, leads to developed new product decisions on the part of
Standard Chartered Bank since it limits the risk levels and reduces the resources comitted to
products which finally fail. The following framework represents the aforementioned practices
followed by Standard Chartered in the launch of new product.
The phases of this framework can be described as follows:
New Product Strategy: This phase connects the New Product Development procedure to the
Bank’s set goals and objectives and provides it with focus for concept/idea creation and guiding
principles for determining screening criteria ( Staff Reporter, 2019).
Idea/concept generation: A select team in charge of the project searches for product ideas that
fulfill the Bank’s goals (Standard Chartered Bank , 2019). Characteristically, Standard Chartered
Bank, Cote d’Ivoire generates hundreds of ideas, perhaps even thousands, to unearth a handful of
good ones at long last. Ideas can be sourced from:
 Internal sources: The Bank discovers new concepts internally. Ideas can be found through
research or contributions from staff.

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 External sources: Standard Chartered discovers new ideas/concepts externally. Ideas can
be sourced from suppliers and distributors or even competitors. The most significant
external source of ideas is the clients, since the NPD process ought to concentrate on
creating value for the customer.
Idea Screening
Encompasses the first scrutiny to establish which ideas are relevant and need more
comprehensive investigation. Idea screening implies filtering the several ideas found in order to
choose the best. The Bank filters all generated ideas in order to discover excellent ones and do
away with the bad ones as soon as possible. Whilst the primary rationale of creating ideas is to
generate a huge number of ideas or concepts, the intention of the succeeding phases is to
decrease that number as much as possible. The motive is that product development expenditures
increase to a great extent in later phases. As a result, Standard Chartered would prefer to proceed
only with those product ideas which shall become lucrative products (Standard Chartered Bank,
2011). Doing away with the poor ideas as soon as possible is, therefore, of fundamental
significance.
Business Analysis: The Bank further assesses the idea/concept on account of its quantitative
factors, for instance sales volume, Return-on-investment (ROI), and profits. In this step in the
Company reviews costs, the profit projections, and sales for the new product about to be
launched to learn whether those factors meet the Bank’s set goals and objectives. If they do
satisfy the firm’s objectives, the product is now moved on to the actual development stage. In an
attempt to forecast sales, the Standard Chartered Bank looks at the sales account or history of
similar products and conducts marketplace survey (Standard Chartered, 2017). After that, it

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estimates maximum and minimum sales to evaluate the risks levels. When the sales estimates are
prepared, the Bank forecasts the anticipated profits and costs for the product, including
operations, marketing, and Research and Development, among others. All the costs and sales
figures together are finally used to analyze the new product’s financial attractiveness.
Development: At this juncture Standard Chartered Bank turns the idea(s) on paper into a
product which is confirmable and producible. The NPD process continues with the concrete
product development. Up to this juncture, for many new product ideas, there can exist only a
rough archetype, a drawing, or even word description. However, if the product idea passes the
business test, Standard Chartered Bank converts it into a physical product to make sure that the
product concept is developed into a practicable market offering.
Test marketing: The bank carries out basic business trials to authenticate earlier business
decisions. In this phase of the NPD process, the new product as well as its planned marketing
program is tested in actual market environments. So, this testing stage provides the Bank
marketers with experience with marketing the new product prior to going to the far expenditure
of full introduction (Mbai, et al., 2018).
Commercialization: The last step in the NPD process is commercialization where the Bank
introduces the new product into the market. This is the final phase in the framework where the
Company now launches the product.
In all of these phases of the NPD process, Standard Chartered Bank, Cote d’Ivoire focuses
primarily on generating superior consumer value. Only then, the newly introduced product can
become a success in the Bank’s targeted marketplace. Only extremely few products essentially

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get the opportunity to emerge a success. The costs and risks are just excessively high such that
they cannot allow all products to pass every step of the NPD process.

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References
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Mbai, E., Ngui, T. & Ngui, T., 2018. COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES IMPLEMENTATION
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