Processing
Creative Concepting: The First Step to Successful
Product Manufacturing
By Mark Crowell, CRC
Any food processing venture first starts with an idea. But how do you come up with the great ideas, the ones that turn
into products that fly off the shelves? Creativity. Common wisdom, however, holds that creativity is an innate gift held by the lucky few.
Such creative genius does exist, but the kind
of creativity that generates most new food
product ideas is a developable skill rather
than an innate talent. Simply participating
regularly in well-run idea generating sessions
called “ideations” can build these skills and an
organization’s creative capabilities. There may
be a number of ideation sessions within the
ideation phase, each with a specific goal or
area of focus. Ideation sessions are in turn
part of “concepting,” the first phase of the
product development process. Concepting is
then followed by phase two, “development,”
and then phase three, “commercialization”
(the latter of which was profiled by the author
in the September-October 2009 issue of
Organic Processing.)
The very first step of all of this, though, is
to develop a strategic system of generating
and screening ideas. To consistently produce
successful new products, most creative companies rely on well-established methods from
multiple sources. Having a process, techniques and tools to generate ideas greatly increases your likelihood of success. One study
by Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., McLean, VA,
estimated that only one new product idea in
58 actually makes it through the development
process and is successful. Thus, in new product development, a shotgun often works better than a rifle.
Ideation sessions are by their nature in-
tense, fast paced events that seek to generate
quantity rather than quality. A typical ideation
session with eight ideators and one to two fa-
cilitators can generate 200 to 300 ideas over
several hours. Of these, 10 to 20 concepts will
be pulled out for further consideration and
yield three to five ideas that provide concept
direction for prototyping.
