Principal Investigator Glen Urban
"Really new" high-tech industrial products typically are characterized by major shifts in existing market structures because they represent evolving new technologies. Product adoption decisions are often assigned to groups within the customer firm because they require the expertise and opinion of different parts of the organization. These decisions are further complicated because customers need a great deal more information as a result of the multiple decision attributes and uncertainty that exists regarding the consequences of their decision. Traditional market research methodologies are of little help for such really new products.
Information Acceleration (IA) is a new methodology that provides customers with full information--via multimedia technology--about a product that will exist in the future. Using such "future conditioned" potential customers the manufacturer can obtain realistic answers to typical market research questions such as likelihood of purchase, tradeoffs between price and features, etc. Previous research has demonstrated the usefulness of IA for consumer durables for which there is typically a single person making the purchasing decision. During the period of this report the method has been extended to the multiple person decision making process. A feasibility study, followed by a large sample study have been performed for a next generation medical instrument. The market is small to medium sized group practices in which multiple physicians and a staff medical technician are involved. Early results point to the importance of personalcommunication among members of the decision making group. As a consequence, the IA multimedia hardware and software have been extended to enable the linking of multiple IA platforms, allowing for audio and video communication.