Experimental Validation of Quantum-Economic Analysis (QEA) as a Screening Tool for New Product Development

Quantum Economic Analysis (QEA®) was originally developed as a tool for business consulting. The key postulate of QEA is that, in order to make a business successful, the combined levels of development of (1) the company, (2) its product, and (3) the target market (further referred to as Combination) must fall within a set of “allowed” combinations (further referred to as Allowed Set). If a business’s Combination is not within the Allowed Set, it will unlikely be successful regardless of how good the company and the product are and how big the target market is. This approach allows business consultants to identify the right business strategy, and, for example, to recommend changes to the company that result in a Combination within the Allowed Set in order to maximize the probability of business success. It has been suggested that QEA, with some minor modifications, may be applicable in technical TRIZ-consulting as well, albeit for a different purpose. In TRIZ-consulting, QEA may serve as a screening tool for new product development that rejects unpromising ideas whose Combination does not fall within the Allowed Set. In this chapter the authors have tried to validate QEA’s Allowed Set experimentally by analyzing a pool of technical solutions for new products developed for different companies in actual TRIZ-consulting projects. The results show that all commercially successful new products generally fell into QEA’s Allowed Set, which confirms that QEA may indeed be included in the arsenal of TRIZ -consulting tools.