You are responsible for initiating innovation projects. Making R&D decisions is a crucial task because your existing product will probably have to be improved during its lifetime to suit the changing needs of customers and to match the technological advances of your competitors.
Research and Development decisions are quite complex and need to be based on thorough analysis of your report. The charts Offering characteristics and Customer preferences in ANALYZE MARKET STUDIES are especially useful to decide on what attributes to improve.
Click the ‘Upgrade…’ button to open the Product Design form, as shown in Figure 12. This form allows you to enter new product characteristics for all technical factors such as ‘Graphics Sophistication’, ‘Multimedia Add-ons’, etc.
Figure 12 – Product Upgrade form
To update a factor, click on the Pencil icon on the right, enter the new value and validate your input by clicking the green check.
Once you have entered the values you think are best suited to your product, the simulation will automatically compute the unit cost of the revamped product. It also calculates the budget that R&D will require to develop the new features and then it tells you whether or not the project is feasible. After making your product decisions, you need to click on OK to return to the main decision page.
Product upgrades are immediately available in the BOSS simulation. This means that if you upgrade your product in a given year, the product that will be marketed during that year will be the upgraded one. There is no elapsed time required by R&D to design and develop a prototype, as it would be in real life.