Introduction to the Text

Welcome to Contemporary Product Development: A Focus on Innovation! We are excited to share the information we have prepared for you, especially our Go-To Market Aura Plan (GT-MAP) framework, which will help you understand what product innovation is, as well as understand the steps involved in designing, developing, marketing, launching, and measuring the success of your future product innovation.

The words “Go-To Market Aura Plan,” as well as the acronym, GT-MAP, carry multiple meanings. First, GT is an acronym commonly used by the automobile industry, which stands for Gran Turismo. The meaning implies high performance and that a GT car meets strict specifications for racing, while at the same time providing “grand comfort” while touring. In this text, we will stress the importance of speed, and we will provide you with the concepts and practices by which you will learn the skills necessary to develop product innovation quickly and confidently. What’s more, you will learn about high-performance product innovation, psychologically as well as biologically. Therefore, the first three words, Go-To Market, coupled with GT, mean to Go-To Market by means of high performance, as fast as possible, as comfortably as possible.

Second, the word “Plan” accurately indicates that we will follow a controlled, proven methodology, while the letters MAP indicate a structure or framework by which a product idea will progress through the myriad steps necessary to transform it into an innovation. The “MAP” in this text includes topics such as talent acquisition, identification of ideal markets, gauging the value that the product will provide to consumers (as well as society at large), measuring and analyzing collected data to predict if the product and its market are viable and if so identifying what type of innovation would be most effective, and much, much more.

In the middle of the “MAP,” if you will, is the letter “A,” which represents the concept of aura and how we recommend a dual approach to product development as we also want to simultaneously tease the market to build interest among consumers with proven techniques that gain attention, build excitement, and then transform that excitement into interest that creates demand for the product, long before it is available for purchase.

We hope that the knowledge and skills that you develop while learning from this text, and engaging with your peers in your business course, will set you on a course for repeated success in the field of product innovation!