Editorial Review:
Product innovation is the key to business growth. But many books deal with innovation from the business process view alone, or confuse innovation with creativity. Written by an innovation expert whose products generate more than one billion dollars in annual revenue, Something Really New introduces a straightforward but powerful framework for creating exciting new product and service concepts . . . simply by asking three essential questions. From an electronic hotel kiosk that provides return airline boarding passes for guests, to something as mundane as the evolution of the toaster, the book provides entertaining, illuminating examples that show how to determine what customer needs aren’t being met, using simple methods to arrive at revolutionary conclusions. For example, "What is a product really used for?" The question may seem elementary, but the right answer is far from obvious. This and other key questions demonstrate how readers can move beyond mere market research to get to the root of real innovation. Practical and eye-opening, this book shows companies how to take the kind of startling leaps that will leave their competition in the dust.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Inspiration based on real-life marketing experiences.  2008-09-03
Denis Hauptly's SOMETHING REALLY NEW: THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO CREATING TRULY INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS offers a three-step approach to creating and marketing new products in any industry, covering the basics of how product ideas are obtained, placed into production, and marketed. From understanding needs and filling them to strategies for getting colleagues and executives to support a new product venture, SOMETHING REALLY NEW offers inspiration based on real-life marketing experiences.
Good focus on benefits, little short on follow-through  2008-08-10
The focus of this book is on analyzing what your customers are really trying to accomplish and seeing how either your current product or product extensions can better serve this need. Better is defined by the operation of the task in terms of complexity, number of steps, and overall time/expense - rather than "shine" on the product.
I liked his work in carefully observing customers and drawing a contrast to companies that just continue to chug along in either the "make it cheaper" or "add the obvious glut of features" dimensions of product analysis. I was also impressed with the number of concrete examples and exercises provided in the book.
The biggest area where this book could have been improved was in information on how to assess whether your product actually worked better for real customers. In previous jobs, I found nothing more useful (and humbling!) than seeing your new product in the hands of customers in a usability lab.
Along these lines, there are more to purchasing decisions than just reducing the number of steps in a task or the complexity in it. Even if you make the job easier (i.e. hanging a picture, as in the book), if the customer enjoys aspects of the task, doesn't have room for an additional tool that doesn't fit in a simple toolbox, or just thinks the product is an "unmanly" way to hang pictures, you will run into sales issues derived from product development issues you should've thought about before getting to the sales/marketing phases.
Idea-filled guide to making your organization more innovative  2008-07-11
Too many books on innovation get bogged down in theory or assume that coming up with new ideas is both the point of innovation and its most important step. In contrast, Denis J. Hauptly cuts through the nonsense with a focus on the customer. Originality, in and of itself, isn't enough, Hauptly says. He encourages innovation that results in useful, beautiful, interesting and profitable products, providing ideas and procedures you can use right away. He also provides "innovation workouts" that ask you to come up with products that solve common problems, and a list of readings. His book could be better organized, but getAbstract recommends it to product developers, for whom it will provide useful tools, and marketers, who must deal with a culture intoxicated by the next big thing.
Something really new 2008-06-11
An excellent guide for the creative/inventor person or persons. A very readable conscience raising study of what it takes to not only formulate utilitarian ideas, but what is needed for successful marketing of these products. The word "niche" comes to mind in the formulation of product ideas. Mr. Hauptly has hit the vein of innovation and invention. Anyone who has had a "bright idea" should read this book.
Something Really A little Bit More Useful would have been a better title 2008-04-20
I think this book makes some useful contributions to the field of new products and services. I learned some useful tips from it.
But I think the title should have been 'Something Really Useful' (since the author stresses utility), or more honestly 'Something Really Just A Little Bit More Useful' since, in my opinion, the author doesn't really address really new product-offerings for all his efforts but rather more useful twists. Granted, they are one notch up from product line extensions. But not of the same league as ground-breaking 'Really New' things.
Firstly, here's what I found useful. a) Utility of function as a prime customer criterion is sometimes overlooked; a good idea to bring that back. See also the 'ACCTO' acronym from Everett Rogers' 'Diffusion of Innovations' where the first criterion in rapid product adoption is relative Advantage of your product-offering against the competitors. b) Look at customers and what they actually use a product for as a way of identifying new areas of innovation. eg. using a kitchen faucet for washing food, hands, dishes, and filling pots for cooking rather than just pouring water. c) Breaking down the task into steps using a verb and an object. eg. Collect pot, turn on faucet, which helps identify steps that can be eliminated and bypassed or combined. d) Thinking ahead to delight the customer by combining a task which he/she has to go through in the future but which is not normally combined. eg. offering an airline boarding pass to an overnight customer checking into a hotel, saving a wait in line the next day at the check-in counter.
Secondly, what I felt the book let me down on was: e)The part of the book (about half of it) about how to organize your company to achieve this innovation mindset was rather pedestrian and was probably asked for by the publishers to bulk up the book. I didn't think it offered anything very new. f) Truly new product-offerings, as much as the autor tries, are not really covered. There is a lot of effort in the book into combining steps in tasks for products and services whch already exist, but nothing really for entirely new ways of doing things. The methodology wouldn't help much in originating new ideas, more in testing whether those ideas would have some chance of working in the marketplace by using better ethnology and in depth customer research. I suspect truly innovatve ideas like these two would never have been helped by the book: in making large amounts of money from search engines using advertising (discovered by google not yahoo after it bought Overture), inventing an airplane (initially rapidly adopted as a way of more accurately delivering munition to targets in war). h). I think there was not enough discussion of how to tell whether an idea is really going to cut it in the marketplace. ie. is it REALLY useful. Customer's reactions are fallible (as the author said) but what to do about them? Thinking utility in the mind of the customer is a step in the right direction, and pointing out that net utility (ie. the positive utility minus the drawbacks such as learning time)is critical and beneficial, but I think the book deals much more with new product-offerings which twist existing products to offer more utility. That doesn't always make them REALLY NEW, nor even REALLY USEFUL, but maybe JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE USEFUL.
In the author's defence, there is actually a real lack of books on new products which really offer something useful and new in addressing the problem of finding new product-offerings which offer something really new and useful to the customer. This book represents an increment forward.
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