After a company has been working on Lean for a while, it reaches the point where it has increased capacity, often significantly. It then faces the challenge of what to do with that capacity, as the emphasis shifts from Lean cutting the bottom-line to top-line growth.

“If you don’t grow sales to use up that capacity, then you’re sort of stuck,” said Sam Miller, WMEP development manager.

To address the specific growth and product develop-ment needs of small and mid sized manufacturers, a new growth solution, Eureka! Winning Ways®, is being offered by WMEP. Eureka! Winning Ways is “a disciplined process for developing measurably smarter choices for growth,” said Miller. “Companies often think they don’t have many choices about how to grow their business. Eureka! Winning Ways not only gives you more choices, but it gives you the ability to validate those choices in terms of their potential to succeed.” Other companies may have ideas for new products, but “they end up with a lot of fast starts that become costly experiments and don’t yield any real benefit,” said Jeff Moore, WMEP manufacturing specialist.

Eureka! Winning Ways was developed by entrepreneur and speaker Doug Hall, whose book, Jump Start Your Business Brain, was a national best seller. He is also known for his appearance as a judge on the ABC television show American Inventor and for his radio show, Brain Brew Radio. A prolific inventor during his tenure in corporate America, Hall has an extensive track record of successfully bringing new products to the marketplace. At Procter & Gamble, he was able to develop a record nine innovative products in 12 months. He founded Eureka! Ranch® Technologies to help companies of all sizes become more creative about growth.

Eureka! Winning Ways is designed to expand a company’s thinking by looking at its marketing messages and potential new customers, markets, products and services in terms of three key customer questions:

1. What is the dramatic difference between what we offer and others offer? (Why should a customer care?)
2. What is the overt benefit of our products and services? (What’s in it for the customer?)
3. What is the real reason to believe we can deliver on this overt benefit? (Why should a customer believe us?)

Eureka! Winning Ways System

The system consists of three steps that encompass generating and refining new ideas, selecting and analyzing the ideas most likely to succeed and moving the best ideas forward into the marketplace:

• Idea engineering with Eureka! 7.0: Eureka! 7.0 is an idea generation system that goes beyond basic brainstorming. “It uses a much more disciplined approach to idea generation,” said Miller. Participants are asked to think deeply about the three key customer questions above, both individually and as a group. “It’s an all day process of very structured idea generation and thinking deeply in terms of those questions,” said Miller. The results are 50 or more new ideas, which are then pared down to four. The four ideas with the highest probability of success move on to the next step.
   
• Success screening with Merwyn Research: Merwyn Research is a scientific method that evaluates how obvious an idea is to potential customers. Ideas are benchmarked against 50 success factors drawn from case studies and data developed from 1300 hours of work specifically with small and mid-sized companies. “The goal is to evaluate whether an idea resonates with customers,” said Moore. “Small and mid-sized manufacturers have fewer resources, so when they decide to move a product forward, they need to have a level of confi¬dence that it will be successful.”
   
  Merwyn has an 88% reliability forecasting the probability of success, meaning “if it says an idea is going to be successful, there’s an 88% chance that your idea will be a viable product five years from now,” said Moore. “It gives you some insight on whether to move forward while you still have a minimal investment in the idea.” Of the four ideas that go into Merwyn, two are identified to move forward.
    
• Action plan coaching with TrailBlazer R&D Process: The Trailblazer coaching process creates a system for investigating and developing growth initiatives more quickly, cheaply and with less risk than traditional project manage¬ment. The goal is to develop a detailed, 30-day plan to test the feasibility of the two remaining ideas.

This can include conducting more in-depth market research and determining whether the company can pro¬duce the new products in a cost-effective way and at the performance levels that have been identified. The idea is to “fail fast, fail cheap.” You don’t want to put a lot of resources into developing the idea until you have a pretty good notion whether you can produce it and whether people are going to buy it,” said Miller.

The TrailBlazer process also emphasizes individual ownership and responsibility among team members, advocates a “borrow, don’t build or buy” policy and confronts potential project “death threats.” Studies show that using the TrailBlazer process to develop new ideas can greatly reduce the time, cost and staffing levels needed for new product development.

One of the major advantages of Eureka! Winning Ways is its ability to predict the success of a new product or service. “Having that validation of market acceptance is key,” said Moore. The shaping of the marketing message for the new product or service is also crucial. “You’re able to define the message that will be used in the market¬place. It’s not, here’s the better mousetrap. It’s, here’s the better mousetrap that’s different, that provides overt benefits and here’s the reason to believe it will do that for you,” said Moore.

Eureka! Winning Ways also “provides you with the ability to keep bringing new ideas into your business” said Miller. “It creates an idea pipeline that enables you to sustain growth.”

The Eureka! Winning Ways process generates ideas for new products and services while minimizing risk and opening new avenues for top-line growth. It not only validates ideas with hard data, but it “looks at what your company could be doing that might be in a totally different direction,” said Miller, helping you make use of extra capacity to move into a new territory of growth and opportunity.

For details on Eureka Winning Ways, call WMEP at 877-800-2085.