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Creating New Products Goes Beyond the Elves at the North Pole
You may wonder who comes up with the ideas for the various products at a company like LeapFrog. Is there some elf at the North Pole? Some teacher turned mad scientist who we lock in a back room somewhere? Or do we have people in white coats watching children play from behind one-way glass?
Except for the elf at the North Pole (he retired in 2003), the answer to the questions above is yes—but there is more.
Creating new products is a process, and some parts of it are, as you’d expect, fairly sophisticated. We hire lots of creative people, and they have diverse backgrounds—from design to education, entertainment, toy design, game design, and engineering, to name but a few. And we, like most consumer companies, immerse ourselves in research of all types.
We really do have rooms with one-way glass where we can watch kids (and their parents) play with our fun learning products (but our researchers stopped wearing white coats when the elf retired).
Tag Junior is an example of a product that came out of formal research and roughly ten years’ experience helping kids learn and love to read. We know that young kids (ages 2 to 4) have a different inherent interest in words, letters and the idea of reading than do kids who are 4, 5 or 6. They also have a different ability to do things like turn a page and hold a device in their hand, and certainly the topics that “float their boat” are different, too. All this led us to develop Tag Junior and Tag Junior board books in a way that is substantially different than our popular Tag Reading System. Note, for example, that the shape of Junior is designed for a small child’s hands.
My Pal Scout, our new customizable plush learning toy for infants, came from a much simpler process. It came from a conversation among our product designers and sales people, who wanted to do something “new for the youngest LeapFrog customer and the newest LeapFrog parent.” And it also came from the poking and prodding of the CEO—that would be me. It was important to me that if we must make (and sell) a plush toy, let’s make it very LeapFrog, meaning it had to be connected to our Learning Path. I didn’t want to make the product un-cute or complicated, but I did want it to be something that made clear to a mom how much her child really could learn from a plush toy. Even a toy that is seemingly simple or cuddly can be made interesting each time her child picked it up and squeezed it, and by connecting Scout, moms can make it say a child’s name, update the songs it plays, choose a child’s favorite color and more.
At the end of the day, we think both Tag Junior and My Pal Scout will be successful products, though each came to life through a very different process.
Thanks for reading the Frog Blog. I'll be back soon with updates and views from our Pond.
Jeff Katz
LeapFrog CEO
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