What keeps a company from following through on its new product ideas? Yesterday I saw first-hand how the lack of a defined innovation process, or a defined new product development process, holds up the development of new ideas into new product concepts.

We were having a post-ideation session debrief meeting with a client for whom we've been working, and I heard one of our clients say, "We've had lots of ideas, but never got to concept stage with them." Another corrected, "We concepted the ideas, but we never tested them and moved forward with them."

How does a company decide to move forward with a new product concept? Whatever they do, there must be an internal evaluation period, and hopefully some market research testing and forecasting. Obviously companies that have a defined process for doing these things definitely have the edge over companies that have to make it up from scratch every single time.

Listening to my clients talking yesterday made me realize that just trying to keep the momentum going when you don't have a process in place must be incredibly difficult. And our client was not a small company. They are not a company that routinely introduces new products, but they'd like to be. In order to get there, they need to get some processes in place. That's not what we do for clients, but it's much easier to work with clients who do already have this framework in place.