市场学case9newproductdevelopment.doc

Company Case 9 (new-product development) Canon’s Elph: Is smaller better? The camera designer leaned back in his chair and glanced around the table at the assembled group of engineers in Canon USA’s Lake Success, New York, headquarters. He then casually reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and tossed it onto the table. “Your challenge is to make a camera just that size – no bigger. Just like that cigarette pack, I want to be able to put it in may shirt pocket. Further, I want it to have all the latest technological features.” Responding to the challenge Producing a small camera is only one of the challenges that Canon and other camera makers are facing. Camera sales in the United States fell in both 1994 and 1995. In 1995, amateur photographers spent only 41.34 billion as they snapped up 14.8 million cameras, down from 15.4 million in 1994. To counter this decline, a team of camera and film makers launched the Advanced Photo System (APS) in 1996. APS is a product of 10 years of research and development sponsored by Kodak, Canon, Fujifilm, Minolta, and Nikon. These companies formed a group known as the System Developing Companies (SDC) to develop the APS technology and control its licensing to other camera, film, and photofinishing equipment manufacturers. The heart of the APS system is its film and film cartridge. Engineers developed the new film and its cartridge t eliminate many of the most common film loading and handling mistakes that plague amateur photographers. The user simply has to drop the APS film into the camera. There is no “leader,” that strip of film that the 35 mm film user usually has to extend and place properly in a camera in order to load the film. The cartridge also features an encoded disk on its top that tells the camera the film’s speed, the number of exposures on the roll, and other information. The film rolls offer 15, 25, or 40 exposures per roll and come in ISO ratings of 100, 200, and 400. The 24 mm APS film al