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January - 2015 - issue > In My Opinion

Outsourced Product Development (OPD) - Driving Innovation

Anil Bhaskar
Managing Partner & President-Asentech LLC
Monday, January 12, 2015
Anil Bhaskar
Today, businesses are mindful of the need to stay flexible in order to survive and grow in the dynamic and internet-driven world. This requires them to be constantly vigilant and respond to market needs. Outsourced Services, especially offshore services, have become very common place and almost a given in a multitude of industry verticals.
With ever-increasing competition, companies focused and driving innovation in the US are now opening up new avenues for Outsourced Product Development; inviting offshore services to participate from the concept level for development of new innovative (and non-standard) product development.
Some of the primary challenges faced by any company (big or small) driving and thriving through constant innovation are Conceptualization, Time, Effort and Budget for Development, which in turns forces the company to choose among multiple concepts, time to Beta, risk of failure and depletion of budget in non-successful efforts.
While some of these issues can very easily be addressed with offshore development, the primary barriers to off-shoring are:
a) Off-shore companies have typically delivered to established and standardized business processes.
b) Such companies typically work on standard SDLCs and success relies majorly on well developed and documented requirements.
c) Environmental and cultural variations within the country level environments, e.g. Healthcare system in the US is vastly different with multitude of variations in the stakeholder roles, as compared to India or China.

To address the above issues a new breed of Offshore Product Development organizations are mushrooming redefining the rules of engagement as it pertains to Offshore Product Development.
While the approach to address the new type of requirement; participating in the innovation cycle ground up, is not entirely different what was done in the early days of offshore, the companies have tweaked the model and have rather adapted to a boutique version of engagement instead of the cookie-cutter model.

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