New Product Development and Commercialization

GE Advanced Materials – Developing Spherical Boron Nitride

Situation

The boron nitride powder team at GE Advanced Materials had long considered development of a new high-performance filler to further expand its already-strong presence in the electronic materials market.  However, the team could never justify the program due to concerns over cannibalization of existing sales in an already-crowded market space, which also provided for a cap on potential pricing levels and profitability of the new product.

Approach

Through in-depth market segmentation analysis, Greg identified applications in an adjacent electronic materials market, supporting a higher price point and justifying the program.  Greg also used a value-equivalence line approach to determine that the product could be commercialized at a significant premium to the original estimated price based on the core market.  Finally, Greg employed new commercialization techniques centered on reaching key influencers via trade shows and direct customer visits to rapidly raise awareness of the new solution.

Results

The premium-pricing strategy delivered significant sales at a gross margin that allowed GE to gain rapid return on the program investment and meet profit contribution plans in the first year.  Simultaneously, Greg encouraged customers in the new application to evaluate other GE filler materials for potential use in future product development programs, thus expanding GE’s reach into this premium market segment.

GE Lighting – Commercializing Video Projection

Situation

When Greg was promoted to Global Product Manager for the Short Arc Video Projection product at GE Lighting, he stepped into a situation with a committed launch customer in Taiwan for the first product with the program still facing major technical and production risks.  Any significant delay or quality issue in the launch of the first product threatened the future of this multi-million dollar investment.

Approach

Working closely with the initial customer and the technology team, Greg steered the team through several technical and operational challenges to successfully meet the customer’s initial performance and delivery requirements.  Greg helped the production team serve rapidly growing demand from the customer by developing a unique global supply-chain process to minimize shipment times and offset production delays.  Through significant effort, Greg successfully established a launch program with a second customer to mitigate ongoing commercial risk.

Results

Greg led the team to successfully deliver on its first year sales plan while selling out all available production capacity.  Greg was also able to successfully maintain pricing despite significant pressures from the customer, while maintaining their business in the face of some nagging product quality issues.  GE was well-positioned to meet the second year plan including an 8x increase in revenues over the first year’s results.