Marc H. Meyer

Venturing is a pragmatic methods-based book that first helps students conceive, design, and test product and service innovations, develop business models for them, and then write their business plans and investor pitches. The book also delves into different types of investors, stages of investment, and deal structures. It is a perfect book for business planning courses, where the instructor wishes to emphasize innovation and the creation of truly interesting, customer-grounded businesses.

Structured around the idea that innovation is at the core of successful entrepreneurship, this insightful guide by Meyer and Crane establishes innovation as a necessary first step before writing a business plan or developing a financial model. With a focus on pragmatic methods for gaining industry and customer insight and translating this insight into innovative product and service solutions, Meyer and Crane help students design robust business models, financial projections, business plans, and investor presentations. New Venture Creation is devoted to helping students develop compelling business ideas. This is based not only on the authors’ well-known research in product and service innovation, but also on their extensive experience as successful entrepreneurs and investors. In the updated Second Edition, part I guides students through six elements that comprise a clearly defined and focused venture: defining your target industry; defining your target customers; defining the needs and wants of those customers; defining winning product and service solutions; carefully designing a strong business model; determining competitive positioning, and then testing the entire concept against a small population of target customers—all before writing the plan. Think, design, test, and learn are the guiding principles. Part II then focuses on different types of investors and the process for raising capital, creating realistic financial projections, writing a concise but powerful business plan, organizing the venture team, and creating a compelling pitch that speaks to the needs and concerns of investors. The book also includes a number of independent case studies that focus on product, service, and business model innovation—all from recent ventures by students as well as recent college or master’s level graduates.

Most companies know that long-term success does not hinge on any single product but on a continuous stream of value-rich products that target growth markets. Yet many firms inexplicably develop one product at a time, and by doing so fail to embrace commonality, compatibility, standardization, or modularization among different products and product lines. At last, in this timely book, Marc H. Meyer and Alvin P. Lehnerd provide a formula for turning products into profits, enabling companies to design technologically superior products more easily. Their solution is, in two words, PRODUCT PLATFORMS. They argue that firms must focus their energies on developing families of products simultaneously which share common components and technology.The authors describe how the champions of product development separate themselves from less sophisticated companies by building entire families of strong products from a single "platform" of common product structures, technologies, and automated product processes. These successful companies recognize and respond to new market opportunities by integrating core skills and technology in the form of new products. In this easy-to-read and practical book, the authors masterfully elucidate this dynamic and forward-thinking strategy which enables companies to develop innovative products faster, more cheaply, and with less effort.Drawing on in-depth case studies and personal experience with successful companies such as Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Black & Decker, and Boeing, Meyer and Lehnerd show managers how to create extraordinary products and thereby set the standard for combined value and cost leadership in their products. They argue that when a company's products are robust?highly functional, elegant in their design, reasonably priced, and a pleasure to use?the corporation will be equally robust. More importantly, The Power of Product Platforms reveals the methodology and organizational approach for designing, developing, and revitalizing strong products that enable the firm to make the transition from one generation of technology to the next. The authors also explain how well-designed product platforms can generate streams of derivative products through a continuous systematic process of renewal.Meyer and Lehnerd apply this methodology to a broad range of industries; manufacturing in both consumer and industrial markets, software firms, and Internet information services providers.This clear prescription for transforming the bottom line by aggressively managing product development and innovation will become required reading for large and small corporations alike, including entrepreneurs, all of whom depend on the excellence of their new products for growth.

Every company can point to a growth strategy. Far fewer, however, systematically implement them; instead, they spend their time on incremental innovations, or rely on acquisitions. Still, organic, internal growth, accomplished through product line renewal and new service development, is essential to the long-term vitality of corporations across all industries. The FASTPATH to Growth takes on the challenge large corporations have in generating internal innovation--developing new product lines that address new market applications and provide the corporation with new streams of revenue. It integrates the key disciplines--new product strategy, user research, concept development and prototyping, market testing, and business modeling--needed for enterprise growth. The book illustrates its framework with in-depth examples of companies that have leveraged their core technologies to new markets and new types of uses in order to generate impressive results, including IBM, Honda, and Mars. Many of these examples contain templates that readers can use in their own projects. The book ends by addressing the human side of new market applications, providing advice on what executives and innovation team leaders must do to execute the steps of Meyers framework for new market applications development. This comprehensive management guide should appeal to practitioners in research and development, new business development strategists, and product managers, along with students in engineering management, innovation management, and corporate strategy courses that focus on technology industries.