This year's challenge: Design, manufacture and promote a pooper scooper to hygienically collect and transport waste during a dog walk.

All teams were asked to design to the same price point ($19.95), so you can compare product offerings without considering price. Each product site specifies what you get for $19.95; for some products you may get multiple units while for others you may get just one.

Highlights of the 2010 IPD Competition

The 2010 trade show set an all-time record for attendance with 1,344 countable votes cast in the web show, and 412 in the physical trade show. It received multiple compliments about the products, teams and energy on display.

2010 Winning Team
DooDad


Plooper


The Caddy


Canine Canteen


DogEase


The Blue Bag


Pooch Pouch


EcoPaw


Privi


Pawtty Mouth

In broad brush strokes, this appeared to be a classic example of market segmentation.    For example, if DooDad was not in the market, the other origami products probably would have jumped up in market share as they captured those customers interested in a disposable paper product.  Likewise  EcoPaw, Canine Canteen and Privi likely competed with each other for style-conscious “hide the poop” customers.  But, there were complicating forces from Plooper (seemingly like, but not like, anything else) and Pooch Pouch (was this more a carry-all like Caddy, or more a “better bag” solution like Blue Bag?).   The object lesson is that if there are a number of competitors in your segment, you will fight each other for that segment’s natural market share in a roughly zero-sum game.  This is what drives marketing departments to constantly seek dimensions of differentiation and trumpet those to potential customers.

Nobody stocked out at either trade show!  This is very rare, but in retrospect we might have expected this.  All product margins were relatively high, which argues for aggressive inventory policies.  The final profits for each team are as follows.

All teams made a lot of money!  This rarely happens  in IPD.  What drives these results?  With all margins relatively high, this was primarily a market share game.  This is also different than in previous years.  It is NOT that margins don’t matter (they are critical!) but if all teams have robust margins this ceases to be the key differentiator.   A regression model of final profits as a function of market share, margins and inventory policy shows that once market share is in the model the other two variables are statistically insignificant.  The predictive power of market share only is shown in the following graph:

The high margins this year came from many teams moving away from the sort of complex products currently on the market toward simpler items, or items that could be manufactured relatively inexpensively.  With revenues pegged at $19.95, these simpler designs commanded high margins.

2010 IPD Product Web Sites
Click on each product below to view the design team's web site. (from within each site, return to this page by clicking on the "IPD Home" icon)

For more information about the IPD trade shows or course, please contact Tauber at 734.647.1333 or email tauber.info@umich.edu.