Um estudo do processo de planejamento tecnológico de uma empresa nascente: alinhando tecnologia, produto e mercado com foco na necessidade do cliente

Abstract

Many academic technology based-firms (or academic spin-off) are created without a clear vision of how their technologies can fulfill a market demand or solve a specific customer problem. After these firms have been founded, they often undertaken efforts to further develop prototypes into products and services that satisfy effectively a real customer needs and wishes. The long product development times can create several limitations such the same product and service launched by the competitor and underestimation of the costs and resources that take to develop new applications. The objective of this dissertation is to present a study of a technological planning process of a new academictechnology-based firm, emphasizing how it is important the customers voice in the initial steps of the business and prototype planning. From an Action Research strategy, a team of entrepreneurs of Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) interested on exploiting commercially their research results was guided during thirteen months, following aframework to structure a process to align and integrate the technology, product and market (TPM) trinomial focused on customer needs. The goal was reduce the risk of the firm to be created to exploit an unfeasible technology of the commercial and technical point of view including the efforts of the development of prototypes into products widely accepted by the market. With this objective, it was identified that the TechnologyRoadmapping (TRM) and Technology Stage-Gate (TSG) methods and some techniques to obtain customers voice provided the theoretical basis to fill the gap between the discovery technology and the real market demand for new products and services. The results achieved suggest that, to increase the chances of the new business to succeed, the integration of TPM trinomial must be guided to align technology-push and market-pull perspectives in the new product development. Moreover, it became evident that some steps and necessary activities in the customers voice construction must be incorporated in the planning process. Among the main conclusions it can be emphasized that: i) in spite of the difficulties to apply and customize the TRM, the most important benefit of its application is on the learning process that the team was submitted; ii) the use of TRM and TSG together became possible to obtain information about the integration of TPM trinomial in each step of the process such as strategic and operational levels; and iii) the use of qualitative techniques to obtain the customers voice, in special observing customers usage of an existing product and one-on-one interviews, it was important for the academic entrepreneurs to understand the real customer needs and, from there,define product concepts able to (or with more chance to) satisfy them.