Chapter 22:Product Development: Pioneers at Work 345 Copycat or parity products are often developed by reverse engineering. It is fairly easy to copy successful products and to "twist" their design or operation slightly, to bring out a competitive one. MBA LINGO A parity product (or "knockoff") copies a competitor's product or service more or less directly, to give you parity (that is, equality) in the market. In reverse engineering, your engineers take apart a competitor's product to see its materials, assembly, and workings, and then replicate the design. I prefer creativity over copycat tactics, and I'll talk about that later in this chapter. But you may someday need a parity product to stay competitive, so it's silly to rule them out. Finally, technology itself can drive new products. In some industries, such as medical equipment, application of technology to improve diagnostic and treatment generates new products. In others, such as personal telephones and digital assistants, the tech nology itself--the ability to send messages and pictures, access the web, and navigate roadways--meets needs that most people barely knew they had. I'm not denigrating technology-driven product development, which is the tendency to create a product because it's possible (the "if we build it, they will buy it" approach). Technology-driven development often works; however, often it does not, and those are the products we tend not to hear about. Yet many products that set out to meet a widely known need also fail, so there's no single "right way" to go about generating product ideas. Step Two: Test the Concept When you have a product concept, it's essential to test it among potential prospects for the product. These prospects may or may not be among your company's current customers. Concept testing is market research for getting reactions to a product idea. This can be done by just describing the product idea in detail and then asking the respondents a set of structured questions about the concept. Or you can build a prototype and get reactions to that, also with structured questions. With or without a prototype, typical questions to ask in a concept test include the following.