Cisco Systems, Inc.: Collaboration on New Product Introduction

Viking Project Cisco
1. What are the challenges and risks faced by technology companies in new product introduction? When an introducing new product there are several challenges and risks that technology companies face and must take into account before starting development. The technology industry is rapidly changing with new technology being developed and introduced every day. Therefore, time is of most importance and indeed a challenge that technology companies face. There were several examples of ´time to market pressure´ in the case of Cisco Systems Inc. While their new product took several years of development work they had a deadline they had to meet and launch the product extremely quickly, or else they faced the risk of losing market share. In these years of development, new product introduction can be very expensive where companies usually risk spending a lot of money and make large number of prototypes with little certainty that the product design will meet customer requirements. When the product finally enters the market, customers might already have a product that fulfills their needs or they might not even want such a product any longer since the industry is in constant change. Thus, a two-way street with customers is very important in a product´s development as mentioned in the case. Furthermore, in our globalized world today, technology companies also face the challenge of making a design that can fit the global market and meet both local and foreign consumers‟ requirements. Extremely high competition in the technology industry calls for rapid and aggressive introductions of products with better advanced designs at lower costs since competitor discounting is often intense. Therefore, these companies face the challenge of huge cost pressures. Indeed, the Viking team in the case had