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October 8, 2002

The Dow Chemical Company
North West Office Building
Midland, Michigan 48674

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

The eBusiness Department of The Dow Chemical Company is responsible for a variety of new business development activities that are outside of the existing businesses that Dow is currently engaged in.

The goal was to define a new business platform valued at $1 Billion in sales revenue within 10 years in a new business platform including: Home Health, and Safety. The subset of this topic that WinOvations was asked to lead involved contamination control. This is truly a “fuzzy” new business arena, or “white-space” to Dow. This activity required experienced, professional support to help us facilitate brainstorming activities, and then further refine and shape the ideas into a few major business concepts for further development.

WinOvations provided professional facilitation services in support of these goals by:

  • Facilitating an Internal Dow Idea & Need Generation Session, which included prioritizing against size, fit with Dow’s strengths, regulatory issues, time to market and marketplace entrance fees.
  • Front-End Scoping of Marketplace: needs, potential target market size and current industry leaders.
  • Facilitating an “End-User Unmet-Needs-Identification” Focus Group, with key decision makers from industry. This service included video taping the entire one-day session, a full transcription of same, analysis of results, and prioritization of unmet needs and proposed solutions. The use of brainstorming techniques to help understand customer Needs was a key part of WinOvations’ offering.
  • Conducting Later In-Depth Exploratory Interviews: with customers and experts to assist in further shaping the top few new product development concepts identified.

The expert End-User Unmet-Needs Discussion was one of the most effective components of this process and was performed in an exemplary fashion, in a short period of time and at less than one-third of the cost of other leading consultant “Executive-Summit Brainstorming Facilitation” services. WinOvations’ approach has assisted us in evaluating nearly 180 product concepts in twelve broad market categories based on market needs. From this they assisted us in selecting the top few product concepts, which we believe could meet our growth objectives.

Based on these results, we have confidence in their front-end product concept shaping capabilities and would highly recommend their services to others.

Sincerely,

Welton C. Washington
Program Executive
Home Health & Wellness Platform
Kerry J. Kelly
Director,
The Growth Center

A Six Sigma Breakthrough in Innovation

 


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